Climate Change: Swapping Hysteria for Solutions
Climate change should not be a topic so provocative that it splits families against each other at the dinner table. It’s a complex, scientific issue that mainstream politics and media have made black and white and played as a polarizing chip. Either the world is ending in exactly X number of years and days or our emissions have nothing to do with the natural processes of the Earth so do whatever the hell you want. Suddenly, we’re all climatologists — and very cranky ones at that.
Fortunately, while we’re all debating the future of the planet, there are actual experts doing research and identifying impressive, implementable and well-thought innovations to help improve lives and bottom lines. Deep Isolation is one such example. It’s a woman-led, private company that is solving the global $667 billion nuclear waste disposal problem with an advanced technology that leverages standard drilling practices to safely isolate waste deep underground in horizontal, vertical, or slanted borehole repositories. By combining scientific and nuclear expertise with specialized stakeholder engagement skills, Deep Isolation works alongside communities to design and deliver an equitable and environmentally protective disposal solution.
A Measured Approach
Deep Isolation CEO and Co-Founder Elizabeth Muller and Richard Muller, Deep Isolation Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, at the company's 2019 technology demonstration in Cameron, Texas.
Deep Isolation CEO Liz Muller (left), chosen as a regional nominee for EY Entrepreneur of the Year Bay Area 2022, greets Deep Isolation advisor Leslie Goldman of The Artemis Group, at an event in San Francisco celebrating this achievement.
CEO and co-founder of Deep Isolation, Elizabeth Muller, was named a finalist in May 2022 for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Bay Area and a Clean Energy Rising Star in 2020 by Business Insider, which also named Deep Isolation as one of its Top 30 clean tech industry startups based on data compiled by Goldman Sachs. “Hysteria never helps anyone, and we believe in taking a measured approach to the science,” said Elizabeth. “I think there is as much exaggeration taking place as there is denial of the problem. Science isn't perfect, and I'm sure there are many things at play we can never be 100 percent sure about. But regardless, we need to be reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, given the impact on both climate and global health.”
When it comes to solutions that can significantly move the needle, nuclear power is a heavyweight. A zero-emission clean energy source, nuclear energy helped the United States avoid more than 471 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020. That’s the equivalent of removing 100 million cars from the road and more than all other clean energy sources combined (Source: Department of Energy).
“But without a solution for the waste, how can it truly be considered clean?,” Elizabeth posited. “I believe that having a solution such as deep borehole repositories, which will be much easier to deploy than the only other option, a large mined repository, removes a major barrier to the success of advanced nuclear plants.” A borehole repository can be deployed at the site of a power plant, eliminating the need to transport waste to one large centralized mined repository, which places an unfair burden on that one community. “They’re more cost-effective in many cases and can be built in a matter of years, not decades,” she added.
A Track Record in Climate Research
Before Elizabeth founded Deep Isolation, she and her father Richard Muller, a UC Berkeley physicist, tackled the “Is climate change real?” question starting in 2010. They organized a group of scientists to reanalyze the Earth’s surface temperature record and systematically addressed the five major concerns that global warming skeptics had identified. Regarding the first four (potential biases from data selection, data adjustment, poor station quality, and the urban heat island effect), their analysis showed that these issues did not unduly bias the record. The fifth concern related to the over reliance on large and complex global climate models by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the attribution of the recent temperature increase to human-caused forces.
“We obtained a long and accurate record, spanning 250 years, and showed that it could be well-fit with a simple model that included a volcanic term and, as an anthropogenic proxy, CO2 concentration,” explained Elizabeth. “We concluded that the record could be reproduced by just these two contributions, and that inclusion of direct variations in solar intensity did not contribute to the fit. [In short,] we can explain climate change is real by looking at the facts. The historical data record shows it is happening. We then founded our climate nonprofit, Berkeley Earth, in 2013, and that organization has continued its research ever since.”
Taking Action
Motivated by evidence, Elizabeth dove into an arena where she felt she could have the most positive impact. “If we can solve the waste problem and unlock the future of nuclear power, then I’ll feel like I’ve contributed something meaningful,” she said.
An environmentalist and entrepreneur, Elizabeth grew up hiking and backpacking in Northern California. She particularly fell in love with the high country in and around Yosemite.
By applying oil and gas technology, Deep Isolation is providing its government customers worldwide with a clear path forward to deploy clean nuclear energy with a socially responsible, permanent solution for its waste. The ability to dispose of waste deep underground, near the reactor site and to protect communities helps remove barriers to nuclear power, expediting the deployment of an energy source that will enable countries to reduce emissions and fight climate change, increase grid stability and achieve greater energy independence with equity in lesser-developed countries.
As the first private company to tackle this problem and commercialize a solution, Deep Isolation is making an unprecedented commitment to meeting the most stringent safety standards set by any government, to offer an equitable solution that prevents any one community from hosting all of a nation’s nuclear waste, and protecting our people and our planet by securing radioactive waste deep underground where a billion tons of rock can safely absorb the harmful particles for the next million years.
“We need to be smart around our climate solutions and focus on solutions that make a significant difference while not hurting economic development,” said Elizabeth. “This is especially true in developing nations, which shouldn’t have to choose between economic development or reducing emissions.”