I really like what https://www.deepfission.com/ is trying to do. They have the absolute simplest model for nuclear fission that I can imagine. They’re digging one mile (1.6 km) holes dropping low enriched nuclear fuel to the bottom, and filling them with water. The pressure from the one mile column of water is perfect for the reactor. From there, it’s basically a geothermal well.
No need for an expensive containment dome, or expensive plumbing. If anything goes wrong, the nuclear fuel is already a mile underground. When the fuel is used up, they can leave it where it is since it’s below the water table. No need for expensive and hard to source highly enriched uranium.
The hard part is digging the wells, but that seems trivial compared to Quaise, who’s trying to dig 3-20km wells. The Deep Fission wells can just go anywhere (perhaps next to a disused former coal turbine?).
“Importantly, the mile-deep column of water in the borehole is expected to provide the pressure conditions required for safe reactor operation. Water within the borehole is also intended to contribute to the reactor’s thermal management system”. So, what do they do if their drill hole starts leaking, and they lose pressure?
and
“Our boreholes are expected to be lined with multiple layers of casing, including steel casing and concrete intended to maintain structural integrity and isolate surrounding geological formations”
I don’t think those are good answers. They say what they want to do, but almost nothing about how they’ll do that, and try to avoid making hard statements on the what by using “is expected” and “is intended”.
What a waste of perfectly good reprocessing input. "Spent" convention nuclear fuel retains 95% of its energy. Discarding "spent" fuel is a shamefully profligate energy practice we can get away with because we're using not nearly enough nuclear power, making and virgin fissiles are dirt cheap.
> To do both, they’ll have to guarantee that that column of water stays isolated from groundwater for a long time after the fuel is used up.
I wonder if just letting the water gradually dissolve the uranium might not be fine, actually. If it is done far from wells and rivers used for drinking water, then the small amount of radioactive minerals that slowly seep out might not pose a danger. I can't find any studies to back it up, but I imagine there are places on Earth at which enriched uranium buried 1.6km underground poses no threat. I am no expert, so I would love to hear what others think.
Of the all the radioactive elements in a nuclear reactor, uranium is one of the least dangerous (is very weakly radioactive, but it's toxic, it's a heavy metal). It's all the radioactive fission products (many have short half-life and in process of decay produces lot of ionizing radiation) and trans-uranic elements (because they have very long half-life and produce a bit small bits of ionizing radiation for very long time).
One possible of measure of danger is median lethal dose LD50:
Uranium LD50 in mice 114 mg/kg (about the same as Cocaine LD50 96 mg/kg)
There are places underground with high concentration of uranium, they are called uranium ore and sometimes they are mined for uranium.
"The deposit is located at depth of 450 m (1,480 ft), surrounded by and isolated within a layer of water-impermeable illite-chlorite clay, within the Athabasca Sandstone formation. Its age is estimated to be 1.3 billion years. Due to natural containment and lack of any traces of radioactive elements on the surface, the deposit is used as an example of an effective natural deep geological repository."
Steel and concrete are what we use above ground so.....
>They say what they want to do, but almost nothing about how they’ll do that, and try to avoid making hard statements on the what by using “is expected” and “is intended”.
They say nothing about how because those are trivial problems in the well (and oil) drilling industry.
I'm sorry, I've worked in advertising for much of my life, and I just can't get past the top line "Advanced Nuclear for the AI Era". That reads as an extremely desperate or opportunistic marketing pitch to me. Kind of like when you get a brochure for a condo in a high rise that will never be built...except even more shameless?
Create a small sun a mile under the ground, what could go wrong?
Also the actual article it seems has nothing to do with fission, they are focusing on extracting the heat already down there. "superhot rock needed for next-generation geothermal power"
There many kinds of geothermal power and if you don't have access to hot fluids found naturally in basement rock, you have use hot dry rock geothermal energy.
Here the biggest obstacle to economy of the geothermal power is the very low heat conductivity of rock.
"The conductive heat flux averages 0.1 MW/km2. These values are much higher near tectonic plate boundaries where the crust is thinner. They may be further augmented by combinations of fluid circulation, either through magma conduits, hot springs, hydrothermal circulation. "
For comparison: Thus the solar energy arriving at the surface with the sun directly overhead can vary from 550 MW/km2 with cirrus clouds to 1025 MW/km2 with a clear sky
This echoes 'safe fracking' claims - and now many people in proximity have gas coming out of their facets. Digging hazardous materials out of sight into a potentially unstable or potentially becoming leaky structure is never a sound strategy.
>They have the absolute simplest model for nuclear fission that I can imagine
Agree. What I don't understand is: why has it never been done before? They can't possibly be the first to come up with this idea, which doesn't seem to rely on any novel technology.
Quite the opposite. They use proven reactor tech, and they are now going straight to commercial, vs other startups that need to go supercritical first.
I'm not sure that makes the approvals that much cheaper and easier. As I understand it, the slight differences between existing nuclear power plants that are for the most part the same design is already one of the reasons why they are so expensive to build.
Building nuclear power plant underground could save significant costs, because the massive containment building is made from nuclear grade steel and nuclear grade concrete and is very expensive. But you need a low cost excavation technology.
"Nuclear-grade components don’t necessarily have higher performance requirements than conventional components. Reinforcing steel in nuclear-grade concrete, for instance, is the same material used in conventional concrete. Instead, the additional cost often comes from the additional documentation and testing required. Documentation requirements also increase costs indirectly, by reducing market competition among manufacturers. Because these requirements are difficult for manufacturers to implement, many simply don’t bother to manufacture nuclear-grade components."
"Sources of Cost Overrun in Nuclear Power Plant Construction Call for a New Approach to Engineering Design"
"Similarly, while our analysis identifies the rebar density in reinforced concrete as the most influential variable for cost decrease, changes to the amount and composition of containment concrete are constrained by safety regulations, most notably the requirement for containment structures to withstand commercial aircraft impacts. New plant designs with underground (embedded) reactors could allow for thinner containment walls. However, these designs are still under development and pose the risk of high excavation costs in areas or at sites with low productivity."
It's an extremely stupid idea. Your whole water column is going to be contaminated with fission products. And you won't be able to get any reasonable amount of power out of that contraption.
And even if you are stupid enough to actually do this, the fuel efficiency will be terrible. Your only negative feedback for fission is the Doppler effect and thermal expansion. So you will only be able to utilize a tiny percentage of the fissionable materials.
Yes, it would. Fuel is around 2-4% of the total costs for a regular nuclear power plant, but that's because regular reactors can burn it deeply. This reactor will only burn a couple of percents of the available fuel, so the fuel costs will probably be around 10-20 times higher.
BTW, this tradeoff can be acceptable for some very specific applications. Kilopower ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower ) is designed to use passive regulation.
Isolation from _what_? If you reactor melts down, it will contaminate the water column above it. And by having it inside the shaft, you won't be able to do any maintenance on it.
It's a stupid idea designed to filter out investors who are stupid enough to fall for it.
below and penetrating the water table with the potential for short and long half-life transuranic fissile products and a path of least resistance for any runaway conditions which is directly to an uncontained well head... with the extra bonus of installation proposed in 'spent' hydrocarbon bearing regions which implies reduced density substrates with all the tiny seismic outcomes and risks.
I greatly dislike this sort of "doesn't work perfectly everywhere by default therefore doesn't work" take. The steam engine didn't replace all the mules at once.
It should be pretty trivial to pick and choose geologies and depth where it is safe. Maybe that's a lot of places. Maybe that's a few. But it should be trivial regardless.
The USSR built a nuclear district heating system in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) but never commissioned it because of the general anti-nuclear sentiment at that time.
It's certainly possible and not even very hard (by nuclear standards) because the reactor can operate at ambient pressure.
The biggest issue is inefficiency and cost of district heating except for places like Finland. It's now cheaper to install heatpumps instead.
Omg there are things that can go wrong? We should definitely not build it then, do we even need energy anyway?
Seriously, what's wrong with the world is people who go "omg what about the one in a million chance the water table is damaged" when right now Europe is dying from the heat that centuries of burning fossil fuels has caused.
We don’t need any new and untested technology to solve to stop spewing out greenhouse gases. We just need to scale up current green tech. It’s not know how and technology that is lacking, it is political will.
If by "we" you mean the whole world, then we have to do a gigantic scale up of the current green tech, as current green tech produces on minuscule part of the global primary energy.
I don't say we shouldn't do research. What I do say is that we do have all the technology we need. And more importantly, we don't have the time to wait for some future technology that potentially could solve all our problems. The climate disaster has already started (and this [0] is not "the new normal", this is just the beginning, a hint of what we should expect).
The only reason we are in this shithole is because of the lack of political will. It would have been comparable trivial to solve if we just had started 30 years ago when scientists started to yell about that it was getting urgent.
We don't need new technology, it took France only about 20 years to replace it's coal and oil based electric generation with nuclear power generation (between 1976 and 2000).
Because of lack of political will in US and many European countries we continued to burn fuels to generate electric energy.
Page 7 looks like a single point of failure in an unmaintainable device that would result in a well of contaminated water a mile deep that passes through the water table that could never be fixed.
Also, I want to add on that if you lined the well to be single fault tolerant you will still be vulnerable to a high likelihood common mode failure from a single seismic event. Truly just the worst. The founders should pivot hard and fast.
And how many of those places have we dug 100 mile deep holes in and verified nothing has changed? It doesn't take a long look at fracking research to see that this line of reasoning doesn't hold.
Seismic activity collapses the well, trapping the nuke underground, pressure find a way to escape via polluting a "faraway" aquifer, or it doesn't escape and you have a man-made volcano in the works
Not a plausible scenario. The entire point is that by putting these a mile deep that they will self seal if they meltdown. They can't create a volcano because they are only 15MW. If the reactor cracks the radioactive fuel can only contaminate the water at the very bottom of the shaft because it is a mile deep.
I thought the whole point was that the reactor would deliver heated water to the surface for utilization...? But it will magically stop trying to do that if the main shaft is obstructed and there is a separate egress?
Or are you also burying the turbine and power lines a mile deep?
How does this look in practice? You need the water to transfer the heat, so in response to a disaster that has already poisoned the water table you need to extract the water, put it somewhere, and backfill with concrete, all while you've already poisoned miles of water table and fighting from spreading further and damning all workers involved? For what gain?
How exactly will it poison the water table? A mile is in bedrock much deeper than the water table and any radioactive material will stay at the bottom because it is heavy.
seems it usually happened at lesser depths, and for ones deep enough to contain debris, the main effects were geological, from the actual explosion? not what i expected tbh
I'm not sure how this question would be relevant. Nuclear bombs are impractical for power generation and a nuclear reactor is not ever going to turn into a nuclear bomb.
"Project PACER, carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the mid-1970s, explored the possibility of a fusion power system that would involve exploding small hydrogen bombs"
"For the application in EGS drilling, this device uses a metallic waveguide to carry the
millimeter wave (MMW) beam to a standoff distance from the crystalline rock. Argon gas is
used as the waveguide fill medium due to its ability to stay transparent to MMW’s at such
deep depths and thus higher pressures [12]. Purge gas is also used to pump out the excess
material that has been transformed into smaller particles (Figure 2.4). "
As a former geologist involved in drilling, thats going to get real expensive, real fast, in terms relative to regular mechanical drilling thanks to the requirement for argon. Perhaps theres an economically efficient changeover point at depth as mechanical drilling becomes less capable due to increasingly plastic deformation.
You don't need a significant flow of argon, just enough to keep unwanted gasses out of the waveguide.
It's possible there exists a material that is transparent to mm waves, airtight, and can survive the conditions at the bottom of the hole. In such a case they could cap the waveguide and prevent any gas leakage.
I'm quite sure Quaise is well aware that Argon isn't cheap and are already exploring multiple avenues for reducing its usage.
It is interesting that they have to use Argon instead of the more typical Nitrogen or SF6. A waveguide with such a significant pressure differential is decidedly unusual and a unique challenger for what they are doing.
Oh yeah, there's no shortage of reasons not to use SF6. Even in conventional waveguides, as far as I know most designs these days prefer nitrogen or dried atmospheric air.
Some fluorine compounds are quite stable. SF6 has two downsides: its GWP from very great stability in the atmosphere (it needs to rise into the mesosphere to be decomposed, not just the stratosphere, giving it an atmospheric lifetime of as much as 3000 years) and toxic compounds produced when it finally is broken down by energetic processes like arc discharges.
Yeah, they say in their launch video for Project Obsidian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmrna_r_b3A) that they'll drill the first 3km using conventional rotary drilling and mmWave beyond that.
I'd be curious if anyone (perhaps the parent) knows why – my assumption is that it's more expensive and/or not as reliable to drill higher up with mmWave, not least because the ground might be uneven materials, etc., and then it becomes something predictable and harder to rotary drill lower down, incl. as you would spend more time doing things like replacing bits low down and sending things up and down?
If the goal is to simply purge the content of the hole, compressed air is typically sufficient. That said, the wider the hole, and the deeper it is, the harder it is to lift material on air.
To be clear though, I'd love to have one of these rigs on my old project and compare rate of progression and hole quality. Particularly when establishing the hole in sedimentary gravels and clays. I imagine casing will still be required.
One thing that I'd be concerned about is the ability to collect samples if most of the material is being vaporised or melted. Similarly, the cooking of the side of the hole on the way down could make geophysical responses much more difficult to interpret. Sonic velocity would probably increase, televised would probably be harder to interpret, harder to spot hydrothermal infill in sedimentary cover, would it affect gamma tools (probably not)
Edit: also wondering how the hole holds up around aquifers. Does the super heating cause wall instability immediately above the non geothermal aquifers as superheated steam is created? How does this affect the hole stability if we are not casing?
Edit 2: if we are not casing, how does the hole hold up around aquifer sands, loose fill, fractured or brecciated mass?
Edit 3: Also! Do we ream open the top of the hole to down past the last aquifers before the geothermal horizon? If not, how are we stopping stopping aquifers interplay and interaquifer contamination?
perhaps, but usually things like "which fossil species are present" are also utilized to figure out what's going on near the drill bit, like if you're trying to reach oil deposits right along the edge of an old riverbed.
Some shale formations in Michigan, for example, sometimes requires drilling to a 4" thick target. You don't know the exact depth because the depth of that 4" thick layer can vary by many feet from an another spot 100m north/south.
I'm aware that if you search "thickness of Antrim shale" or "thickness of Collingswood shale", Google will happily tell you that it's 20-40 feet thick, but for modern drilling techniques, the economics of the well depend on hitting a much more narrow target than that, which can be delicately guided in by analyzing fossils that come up.
No fossils in granite. Drilling shake shouldn’t require new technology, most shales are easy to drill (except cherts, where again, no fossils.
I doubt this tech would be needed for exploration but for reliable brownfield development.
Naively, I wonder how much the density of argon gas helps here, in terms of being able to recover and reuse the argon gas in a relatively closed-loop system.
[Thermal fracturing or spallation, meant to displace or weaken the material for excavation] does gasify some of the water and minerals, but excavation is still necessary.
I started designing a combined unit for this (mmwave + ultrasound) with TLA+ and Rust, but don't have any use for drilling and tunneling myself.
I got into this because a bronze scepter of certain dimensions might carry a 28 khz resonance for ~30s, which - with nanodiamond drilling sand from e.g. pyrolyzed ash and sand - could explain the observed ancient copper core drilling speeds.
But why are there no near-term products? If you can cut through granite and such this way, it ought to be useful for other cutting jobs. There should be useful tools, such as small units for drilling pipe holes through concrete and rock. Going for a 10km hole as the initial product raises the suspicion that the real product is the stock.
For shorter holes traditional mechanical methods work just fine. If you are going to build a giant excavator you don't waste time making shovels for gardeners.
The problem drilling deep into ground is that the power source on the surface of earth and drill bit deep underground are connected by long floppy noodle while the hole is getting crushed from the sides by bunch of elephants. It is difficult to transfer rotation from the motor/power source at the top to the boring head, and reinforce the walls to prevent them from collapsing, having whole thing heated to few hundred ℃ doesn't make it easier on hardware.
In case of something like underground tunnels these problems are avoided by having hole big enough to fit the drilling machine as well as all the equipment and crew to reinforce the walls with concrete.
The fact that people have made a way to drill few hundred to few km using mechanical means is already an engineering marvel. In the context of everyday manufacturing beyond the hole depth to diameter ratio of 5:1 things already start to get more complicated. With more specialized techniques you might get 10:1 - 100:1. A bit easier for softer materials like wood or if you don't care about precision. But for deep underground drilling we are talking about ratio of thousands to 1.
It's not like they are not making tests at shorter depths. Once technology is sufficiently developed it might also trickle down to some shorter few km holes if geological conditions are right. Although probably never for something like few dozen meter water wells or making a hole in concrete at construction site. Not sure how well it works in soft dirt. Who knows about distant future, we now have relatively cheap desktop laser cutters, laser pointers, measuring equipment, microwave ovens, but those were not the initial products when developing those technologies. On the other hand some tech like wire EDM has remained niche manufacturing technology, even though modern electronics and software could allow making it much cheaper.
This company might not be very good at getting deep, but they have definitely figured out how to get press attention.
I have been hearing about them for years in connection with enhanced geothermal, and while other companies are out drilling functional wells, Quaise is just getting basic drilling going, with seemingly zero promise of being cheaper than the alternatives.
Might want to do yourself a favor and figure out the implied question behind 400(?)
It's... not a lot of work. At least for me personally it rubs me the wrong way to name an important metric in Fahrenheit and then to give an estimate with a question mark for the proper SI unit.
Gyrotron isn't quite a maser, more akin to a free-electron (i.e. electron beam) RF source. AFAIR (might be wrong, but based on what I could find there: https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/mi...) they aren't literally vaporizing the rock, rather locally heating it til it crushes into particles that can be blown away.
The video mentions that they did all the drilling so far at 100kW and are expecting to start doing 1 MW within the year.
I wonder what their transmission voltage is. They're talking about a 1km deep shaft. That feels like a lot of conductor to get to 1MW, unless you can send at 20kV or something high. Reciprocally though if you're not transmitting major force through a drillshaft, perhaps it still is a major net win for cost.
Figuring out heat management down there feels like it would likewise be pretty tricky! Again I wonder though how that would compare to the heat generated from drilling and how much management/circulation that requires.
They generate the RF on the surface and transmit it down the borehole thru a waveguide, so it's only limited by arching in the waveguide. Since we only need power transfer and don't care about multimode propagation, the waveguide diameter isn't limited, and probably on the larger side to reduce copper losses. And the heat management is provided by blowing argon which also carries abalated rock particulate to the surface.
I really like what https://www.deepfission.com/ is trying to do. They have the absolute simplest model for nuclear fission that I can imagine. They’re digging one mile (1.6 km) holes dropping low enriched nuclear fuel to the bottom, and filling them with water. The pressure from the one mile column of water is perfect for the reactor. From there, it’s basically a geothermal well.
No need for an expensive containment dome, or expensive plumbing. If anything goes wrong, the nuclear fuel is already a mile underground. When the fuel is used up, they can leave it where it is since it’s below the water table. No need for expensive and hard to source highly enriched uranium.
The hard part is digging the wells, but that seems trivial compared to Quaise, who’s trying to dig 3-20km wells. The Deep Fission wells can just go anywhere (perhaps next to a disused former coal turbine?).
> They’re digging one mile (1.6 km) holes dropping low enriched nuclear fuel to the bottom, and filling them with water.
> When the fuel is used up, they can leave it where it is since it’s below the water table.
To do both, they’ll have to guarantee that that column of water stays isolated from groundwater for a long time after the fuel is used up.
Reading https://www.deepfission.com/faq, they answer that question with
“Importantly, the mile-deep column of water in the borehole is expected to provide the pressure conditions required for safe reactor operation. Water within the borehole is also intended to contribute to the reactor’s thermal management system”. So, what do they do if their drill hole starts leaking, and they lose pressure?
and
“Our boreholes are expected to be lined with multiple layers of casing, including steel casing and concrete intended to maintain structural integrity and isolate surrounding geological formations”
I don’t think those are good answers. They say what they want to do, but almost nothing about how they’ll do that, and try to avoid making hard statements on the what by using “is expected” and “is intended”.
What a waste of perfectly good reprocessing input. "Spent" convention nuclear fuel retains 95% of its energy. Discarding "spent" fuel is a shamefully profligate energy practice we can get away with because we're using not nearly enough nuclear power, making and virgin fissiles are dirt cheap.
> To do both, they’ll have to guarantee that that column of water stays isolated from groundwater for a long time after the fuel is used up.
I wonder if just letting the water gradually dissolve the uranium might not be fine, actually. If it is done far from wells and rivers used for drinking water, then the small amount of radioactive minerals that slowly seep out might not pose a danger. I can't find any studies to back it up, but I imagine there are places on Earth at which enriched uranium buried 1.6km underground poses no threat. I am no expert, so I would love to hear what others think.
Of the all the radioactive elements in a nuclear reactor, uranium is one of the least dangerous (is very weakly radioactive, but it's toxic, it's a heavy metal). It's all the radioactive fission products (many have short half-life and in process of decay produces lot of ionizing radiation) and trans-uranic elements (because they have very long half-life and produce a bit small bits of ionizing radiation for very long time).
One possible of measure of danger is median lethal dose LD50:
Uranium LD50 in mice 114 mg/kg (about the same as Cocaine LD50 96 mg/kg)
Plutonium LD50 in dog 320 μg/kg
Caesium-137 LD50 245 μg/kg
Polonium-210 LD50 10 ng/kg (estimated)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose
There are places underground with high concentration of uranium, they are called uranium ore and sometimes they are mined for uranium.
"The deposit is located at depth of 450 m (1,480 ft), surrounded by and isolated within a layer of water-impermeable illite-chlorite clay, within the Athabasca Sandstone formation. Its age is estimated to be 1.3 billion years. Due to natural containment and lack of any traces of radioactive elements on the surface, the deposit is used as an example of an effective natural deep geological repository."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigar_Lake_mine
>I don’t think those are good answers.
Steel and concrete are what we use above ground so.....
>They say what they want to do, but almost nothing about how they’ll do that, and try to avoid making hard statements on the what by using “is expected” and “is intended”.
They say nothing about how because those are trivial problems in the well (and oil) drilling industry.
We use steel and concrete. We don't usually expect them to last 10,000 years, though.
> those are trivial problems in the well (and oil) drilling industry.
Ah yes, an industry well known for its adherence to safety standards and never having surprising blowouts.
I'm sorry, I've worked in advertising for much of my life, and I just can't get past the top line "Advanced Nuclear for the AI Era". That reads as an extremely desperate or opportunistic marketing pitch to me. Kind of like when you get a brochure for a condo in a high rise that will never be built...except even more shameless?
I think it’s a nod to the idea that AI is set to boil off the oceans unless some seriously novel ideas about power generation take hold.
They kind of have to shoehorn “AI” in there have any hope of raising capital these days.
Probably because AI datacenters would benefit from tech like that.
Create a small sun a mile under the ground, what could go wrong?
Also the actual article it seems has nothing to do with fission, they are focusing on extracting the heat already down there. "superhot rock needed for next-generation geothermal power"
There many kinds of geothermal power and if you don't have access to hot fluids found naturally in basement rock, you have use hot dry rock geothermal energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dry_rock_geothermal_energy
Here the biggest obstacle to economy of the geothermal power is the very low heat conductivity of rock.
"The conductive heat flux averages 0.1 MW/km2. These values are much higher near tectonic plate boundaries where the crust is thinner. They may be further augmented by combinations of fluid circulation, either through magma conduits, hot springs, hydrothermal circulation. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy#Resources
For comparison: Thus the solar energy arriving at the surface with the sun directly overhead can vary from 550 MW/km2 with cirrus clouds to 1025 MW/km2 with a clear sky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant
The sun performs fusion, not fission.
This echoes 'safe fracking' claims - and now many people in proximity have gas coming out of their facets. Digging hazardous materials out of sight into a potentially unstable or potentially becoming leaky structure is never a sound strategy.
>They have the absolute simplest model for nuclear fission that I can imagine
Agree. What I don't understand is: why has it never been done before? They can't possibly be the first to come up with this idea, which doesn't seem to rely on any novel technology.
That sounds like an absolute nightmare to get approvals for.
They got an executive order to ease the regulation...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43911648
Quite the opposite. They use proven reactor tech, and they are now going straight to commercial, vs other startups that need to go supercritical first.
I'm not sure that makes the approvals that much cheaper and easier. As I understand it, the slight differences between existing nuclear power plants that are for the most part the same design is already one of the reasons why they are so expensive to build.
Building nuclear power plant underground could save significant costs, because the massive containment building is made from nuclear grade steel and nuclear grade concrete and is very expensive. But you need a low cost excavation technology.
https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/
"Nuclear-grade components don’t necessarily have higher performance requirements than conventional components. Reinforcing steel in nuclear-grade concrete, for instance, is the same material used in conventional concrete. Instead, the additional cost often comes from the additional documentation and testing required. Documentation requirements also increase costs indirectly, by reducing market competition among manufacturers. Because these requirements are difficult for manufacturers to implement, many simply don’t bother to manufacture nuclear-grade components."
"Sources of Cost Overrun in Nuclear Power Plant Construction Call for a New Approach to Engineering Design"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
"Similarly, while our analysis identifies the rebar density in reinforced concrete as the most influential variable for cost decrease, changes to the amount and composition of containment concrete are constrained by safety regulations, most notably the requirement for containment structures to withstand commercial aircraft impacts. New plant designs with underground (embedded) reactors could allow for thinner containment walls. However, these designs are still under development and pose the risk of high excavation costs in areas or at sites with low productivity."
It's an extremely stupid idea. Your whole water column is going to be contaminated with fission products. And you won't be able to get any reasonable amount of power out of that contraption.
And even if you are stupid enough to actually do this, the fuel efficiency will be terrible. Your only negative feedback for fission is the Doppler effect and thermal expansion. So you will only be able to utilize a tiny percentage of the fissionable materials.
Would the fuel efficiency be sufficiently bad to make the fuel costs relevant to the cost of running the plant, though?
Yes, it would. Fuel is around 2-4% of the total costs for a regular nuclear power plant, but that's because regular reactors can burn it deeply. This reactor will only burn a couple of percents of the available fuel, so the fuel costs will probably be around 10-20 times higher.
BTW, this tradeoff can be acceptable for some very specific applications. Kilopower ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower ) is designed to use passive regulation.
The water column is isolated fron the fuel. The weight of the water column just allows for a cheaper enclosure.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2419/ML24191A372.pdf
Presumably once you are finished with it you could just fill it with concrete.
Or partially fill it and drop another reactor on top.
The only projects that overrun more than nuclear is nuclear waste disposal. This kills two birds with one stone.
So it's a regular reactor BUT IN A MINESHAFT!! The reactors yearn for the mines!
It's even _more_ stupid!
No. Being at the bottom of a mile deep hole in bedrock makes a very effective isolation.
Isolation from _what_? If you reactor melts down, it will contaminate the water column above it. And by having it inside the shaft, you won't be able to do any maintenance on it.
It's a stupid idea designed to filter out investors who are stupid enough to fall for it.
below and penetrating the water table with the potential for short and long half-life transuranic fissile products and a path of least resistance for any runaway conditions which is directly to an uncontained well head... with the extra bonus of installation proposed in 'spent' hydrocarbon bearing regions which implies reduced density substrates with all the tiny seismic outcomes and risks.
perfectly safe /s
I greatly dislike this sort of "doesn't work perfectly everywhere by default therefore doesn't work" take. The steam engine didn't replace all the mules at once.
It should be pretty trivial to pick and choose geologies and depth where it is safe. Maybe that's a lot of places. Maybe that's a few. But it should be trivial regardless.
> it should be trivial regardless.
So should nuclear fission reactors. The concept is absurdly simple.
In practice, however ...
We can then build a primary school on top! And use the water from the well for heating directly.
What could possibly go wrong!?!?
For example in Finland there is research done for nuclear district heating.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fourth-finnish-m...
"Feasibility of small modular reactors for decarbonizing district heating systems: a case study of the Helsinki metropolitan area"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002954932...
Haiyang’s District Heating Project in China
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/carbon-free-heating-kee...
The USSR built a nuclear district heating system in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) but never commissioned it because of the general anti-nuclear sentiment at that time.
It's certainly possible and not even very hard (by nuclear standards) because the reactor can operate at ambient pressure.
The biggest issue is inefficiency and cost of district heating except for places like Finland. It's now cheaper to install heatpumps instead.
Omg there are things that can go wrong? We should definitely not build it then, do we even need energy anyway?
Seriously, what's wrong with the world is people who go "omg what about the one in a million chance the water table is damaged" when right now Europe is dying from the heat that centuries of burning fossil fuels has caused.
With this proposal? There are very few things that will NOT go wrong.
I'm very pro-nuclear, but these kinds of projects are just scams.
We don’t need any new and untested technology to solve to stop spewing out greenhouse gases. We just need to scale up current green tech. It’s not know how and technology that is lacking, it is political will.
If by "we" you mean the whole world, then we have to do a gigantic scale up of the current green tech, as current green tech produces on minuscule part of the global primary energy.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy
"We don't need to research any more potential solutions to this existential problem we're facing" is certainly a take.
I don't say we shouldn't do research. What I do say is that we do have all the technology we need. And more importantly, we don't have the time to wait for some future technology that potentially could solve all our problems. The climate disaster has already started (and this [0] is not "the new normal", this is just the beginning, a hint of what we should expect).
The only reason we are in this shithole is because of the lack of political will. It would have been comparable trivial to solve if we just had started 30 years ago when scientists started to yell about that it was getting urgent.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jun/24/europe-he...
We don't need new technology, it took France only about 20 years to replace it's coal and oil based electric generation with nuclear power generation (between 1976 and 2000).
Because of lack of political will in US and many European countries we continued to burn fuels to generate electric energy.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Developing countries like China and India prioritized cheap coal power generation.
Only if the primary school is exclusively for the children of oligarchs.
The nuclear fuel is contained inside a reactor vessel. The water pressure just allows it to be much cheaper.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2419/ML24191A372.pdf
Page 7 looks like a single point of failure in an unmaintainable device that would result in a well of contaminated water a mile deep that passes through the water table that could never be fixed.
This sounds like the worst idea I've ever heard.
Also, I want to add on that if you lined the well to be single fault tolerant you will still be vulnerable to a high likelihood common mode failure from a single seismic event. Truly just the worst. The founders should pivot hard and fast.
There are plenty of places with very little seismic activity.
And how many of those places have we dug 100 mile deep holes in and verified nothing has changed? It doesn't take a long look at fracking research to see that this line of reasoning doesn't hold.
100 miles deep? What are you even talking about?
100x one mile deep holes. It's in the deck you linked for a 1 GWe plant.
Yeah, 76cm (30 inch) bore hole drilling with standard oil&grass rig.
Fill with unshielded nuclear reactor of novel type: super skinny.
Gently lower down until depth of 1 mile is reached.
Repeat 1000x for a 1 GWe power plant.
What could possibly go wrong? Best horror story of the year in 15 slides.
Please explain exactly what you think can go wrong.
Seismic activity collapses the well, trapping the nuke underground, pressure find a way to escape via polluting a "faraway" aquifer, or it doesn't escape and you have a man-made volcano in the works
Not a plausible scenario. The entire point is that by putting these a mile deep that they will self seal if they meltdown. They can't create a volcano because they are only 15MW. If the reactor cracks the radioactive fuel can only contaminate the water at the very bottom of the shaft because it is a mile deep.
I thought the whole point was that the reactor would deliver heated water to the surface for utilization...? But it will magically stop trying to do that if the main shaft is obstructed and there is a separate egress?
Or are you also burying the turbine and power lines a mile deep?
A mile is much deeper than the water table is almost everywhere. It is normally solid bedrock. So you can just fill the hole with concrete and dirt.
How does this look in practice? You need the water to transfer the heat, so in response to a disaster that has already poisoned the water table you need to extract the water, put it somewhere, and backfill with concrete, all while you've already poisoned miles of water table and fighting from spreading further and damning all workers involved? For what gain?
How exactly will it poison the water table? A mile is in bedrock much deeper than the water table and any radioactive material will stay at the bottom because it is heavy.
What are the side-effects of regularly detonating nuclear bombs at that depth?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_nuclear_weapons_te...
seems it usually happened at lesser depths, and for ones deep enough to contain debris, the main effects were geological, from the actual explosion? not what i expected tbh
I'm not sure how this question would be relevant. Nuclear bombs are impractical for power generation and a nuclear reactor is not ever going to turn into a nuclear bomb.
"Project PACER, carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the mid-1970s, explored the possibility of a fusion power system that would involve exploding small hydrogen bombs"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER
From the thesis: https://www.proquest.com/openview/624989df3cdd8055a6cee9affc...
"For the application in EGS drilling, this device uses a metallic waveguide to carry the millimeter wave (MMW) beam to a standoff distance from the crystalline rock. Argon gas is used as the waveguide fill medium due to its ability to stay transparent to MMW’s at such deep depths and thus higher pressures [12]. Purge gas is also used to pump out the excess material that has been transformed into smaller particles (Figure 2.4). "
As a former geologist involved in drilling, thats going to get real expensive, real fast, in terms relative to regular mechanical drilling thanks to the requirement for argon. Perhaps theres an economically efficient changeover point at depth as mechanical drilling becomes less capable due to increasingly plastic deformation.
You don't need a significant flow of argon, just enough to keep unwanted gasses out of the waveguide.
It's possible there exists a material that is transparent to mm waves, airtight, and can survive the conditions at the bottom of the hole. In such a case they could cap the waveguide and prevent any gas leakage.
I'm quite sure Quaise is well aware that Argon isn't cheap and are already exploring multiple avenues for reducing its usage.
It is interesting that they have to use Argon instead of the more typical Nitrogen or SF6. A waveguide with such a significant pressure differential is decidedly unusual and a unique challenger for what they are doing.
SF6 is a horrifically powerful greenhouse gas, so I doubt it could be used. Its GWP is somewhere around 23,000 on a 100 year timescale.
Oh yeah, there's no shortage of reasons not to use SF6. Even in conventional waveguides, as far as I know most designs these days prefer nitrogen or dried atmospheric air.
Anytime i see fluoride, im immediately concerned about anything in its immediate surroundings...
Some fluorine compounds are quite stable. SF6 has two downsides: its GWP from very great stability in the atmosphere (it needs to rise into the mesosphere to be decomposed, not just the stratosphere, giving it an atmospheric lifetime of as much as 3000 years) and toxic compounds produced when it finally is broken down by energetic processes like arc discharges.
You DO need significant flow to extract the "Drilled" material.
This is such a sketchy company. Their "Demo" video doesn't demo anything.
At least this is progress though. In previous hype videos they just pretended you don't need to extract anything!
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There is definitely an economic changeover point, I’m sure I read they will use conventional drilling down to a certain depth, before switching to MMW
I doubt argon is the purge gas.
Yeah, they say in their launch video for Project Obsidian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmrna_r_b3A) that they'll drill the first 3km using conventional rotary drilling and mmWave beyond that.
I'd be curious if anyone (perhaps the parent) knows why – my assumption is that it's more expensive and/or not as reliable to drill higher up with mmWave, not least because the ground might be uneven materials, etc., and then it becomes something predictable and harder to rotary drill lower down, incl. as you would spend more time doing things like replacing bits low down and sending things up and down?
That's pretty much it. They're not going to beat conventional drilling on price at lower depths, so why bother with it?
You mean the argon gas used as medium specifically? I assume the purge gas is something else, cheaper?
If the goal is to simply purge the content of the hole, compressed air is typically sufficient. That said, the wider the hole, and the deeper it is, the harder it is to lift material on air.
To be clear though, I'd love to have one of these rigs on my old project and compare rate of progression and hole quality. Particularly when establishing the hole in sedimentary gravels and clays. I imagine casing will still be required.
One thing that I'd be concerned about is the ability to collect samples if most of the material is being vaporised or melted. Similarly, the cooking of the side of the hole on the way down could make geophysical responses much more difficult to interpret. Sonic velocity would probably increase, televised would probably be harder to interpret, harder to spot hydrothermal infill in sedimentary cover, would it affect gamma tools (probably not)
Edit: also wondering how the hole holds up around aquifers. Does the super heating cause wall instability immediately above the non geothermal aquifers as superheated steam is created? How does this affect the hole stability if we are not casing?
Edit 2: if we are not casing, how does the hole hold up around aquifer sands, loose fill, fractured or brecciated mass?
Edit 3: Also! Do we ream open the top of the hole to down past the last aquifers before the geothermal horizon? If not, how are we stopping stopping aquifers interplay and interaquifer contamination?
i think they plan to drill with a traditional rig until they get deep/hot enough to necessitate a switch to mm wave
Great response! I'm just a layman here (former material scientist) but it's fun to think about this stuff!
Maybe you could hook up a mass spectrometer to the purge gas to get real time composition.
perhaps, but usually things like "which fossil species are present" are also utilized to figure out what's going on near the drill bit, like if you're trying to reach oil deposits right along the edge of an old riverbed.
Some shale formations in Michigan, for example, sometimes requires drilling to a 4" thick target. You don't know the exact depth because the depth of that 4" thick layer can vary by many feet from an another spot 100m north/south.
I'm aware that if you search "thickness of Antrim shale" or "thickness of Collingswood shale", Google will happily tell you that it's 20-40 feet thick, but for modern drilling techniques, the economics of the well depend on hitting a much more narrow target than that, which can be delicately guided in by analyzing fossils that come up.
No fossils in granite. Drilling shake shouldn’t require new technology, most shales are easy to drill (except cherts, where again, no fossils. I doubt this tech would be needed for exploration but for reliable brownfield development.
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Naively, I wonder how much the density of argon gas helps here, in terms of being able to recover and reuse the argon gas in a relatively closed-loop system.
Why mmwave instead of ultrasonic? FWIU 28 kHz shreds the quartzite in granite?
Isn't the idea here to gasify the rock by essentially microwaving it? With ultrasound, wouldn't you still need to remove the leftover rocks?
[Thermal fracturing or spallation, meant to displace or weaken the material for excavation] does gasify some of the water and minerals, but excavation is still necessary.
I started designing a combined unit for this (mmwave + ultrasound) with TLA+ and Rust, but don't have any use for drilling and tunneling myself.
I got into this because a bronze scepter of certain dimensions might carry a 28 khz resonance for ~30s, which - with nanodiamond drilling sand from e.g. pyrolyzed ash and sand - could explain the observed ancient copper core drilling speeds.
Fwiw, I'll share some surfing:
Nice article on an earlier demo: https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-energy-millimeter-wave-dr... ; linked from this (nice but lots lots of ads): https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-energy-millimeter-wave-dr... .
Company https://www.quaise.com/ on YT https://www.youtube.com/@quaise
MS thesis (2024; browsable) on the vitrified wall, for that and its intro: https://www.proquest.com/openview/624989df3cdd8055a6cee9affc...
Search for papers "Millimeter Wave Drilling for Deep Geothermal Energy Production" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=Mil...
That's impressive.
But why are there no near-term products? If you can cut through granite and such this way, it ought to be useful for other cutting jobs. There should be useful tools, such as small units for drilling pipe holes through concrete and rock. Going for a 10km hole as the initial product raises the suspicion that the real product is the stock.
For shorter holes traditional mechanical methods work just fine. If you are going to build a giant excavator you don't waste time making shovels for gardeners. The problem drilling deep into ground is that the power source on the surface of earth and drill bit deep underground are connected by long floppy noodle while the hole is getting crushed from the sides by bunch of elephants. It is difficult to transfer rotation from the motor/power source at the top to the boring head, and reinforce the walls to prevent them from collapsing, having whole thing heated to few hundred ℃ doesn't make it easier on hardware.
In case of something like underground tunnels these problems are avoided by having hole big enough to fit the drilling machine as well as all the equipment and crew to reinforce the walls with concrete.
The fact that people have made a way to drill few hundred to few km using mechanical means is already an engineering marvel. In the context of everyday manufacturing beyond the hole depth to diameter ratio of 5:1 things already start to get more complicated. With more specialized techniques you might get 10:1 - 100:1. A bit easier for softer materials like wood or if you don't care about precision. But for deep underground drilling we are talking about ratio of thousands to 1.
It's not like they are not making tests at shorter depths. Once technology is sufficiently developed it might also trickle down to some shorter few km holes if geological conditions are right. Although probably never for something like few dozen meter water wells or making a hole in concrete at construction site. Not sure how well it works in soft dirt. Who knows about distant future, we now have relatively cheap desktop laser cutters, laser pointers, measuring equipment, microwave ovens, but those were not the initial products when developing those technologies. On the other hand some tech like wire EDM has remained niche manufacturing technology, even though modern electronics and software could allow making it much cheaper.
> There should be useful tools, such as small units for drilling pipe holes through concrete and rock.
We already have cheap and effective mechanical drills capable of these tasks, and it's unlikely a brand new technology can compete with those on cost.
Unlike in the actual design niche, where mechanical tools are infeasible due to the temperatures involved.
Its worth noting the original article was written July 2025. Not June 2026
This company was previously featured on a video by Real Engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0
This company might not be very good at getting deep, but they have definitely figured out how to get press attention.
I have been hearing about them for years in connection with enhanced geothermal, and while other companies are out drilling functional wells, Quaise is just getting basic drilling going, with seemingly zero promise of being cheaper than the alternatives.
Might want to do yourself a favor and figure out the implied question behind 400(?) It's... not a lot of work. At least for me personally it rubs me the wrong way to name an important metric in Fahrenheit and then to give an estimate with a question mark for the proper SI unit.
Looks to me like the author wrote themselves an inline note and forgot to remove it before publishing.
I'd assumed that the question mark was supposed to be a degrees (°) symbol but got mangled somehow. 752F is exactly 400C
Wow. That's interesting. Thats tx of 300ghz.
Very interesting application of radio waves.
How do they keep the temperature of the borehole high enough so that the vapours don't condense on the borehole(and equiment) on their way out?
They made the laser drill from The Core IRL?
Except that it is not a laser but a high power radio transmitter made with a vacuum tube (gyrotron).
For generating the highest possible power of radio waves, vacuum tubes remain the only solution.
This drilling method resembles more a microwave oven (which uses a magnetron), than a laser.
Can someone explain how this works? A gyrotron is some kind of maser (like a laser but with microwaves). Are they vaporizing the rock?
Gyrotron isn't quite a maser, more akin to a free-electron (i.e. electron beam) RF source. AFAIR (might be wrong, but based on what I could find there: https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/mi...) they aren't literally vaporizing the rock, rather locally heating it til it crushes into particles that can be blown away.
Impressive, but how long did it take to drill 100 meters? I didn't see a mention of that.
They mentioned about 1 hour per meter at 1 MW.
The video mentions that they did all the drilling so far at 100kW and are expecting to start doing 1 MW within the year.
I wonder what their transmission voltage is. They're talking about a 1km deep shaft. That feels like a lot of conductor to get to 1MW, unless you can send at 20kV or something high. Reciprocally though if you're not transmitting major force through a drillshaft, perhaps it still is a major net win for cost.
Figuring out heat management down there feels like it would likewise be pretty tricky! Again I wonder though how that would compare to the heat generated from drilling and how much management/circulation that requires.
Based on what I could find:
They generate the RF on the surface and transmit it down the borehole thru a waveguide, so it's only limited by arching in the waveguide. Since we only need power transfer and don't care about multimode propagation, the waveguide diameter isn't limited, and probably on the larger side to reduce copper losses. And the heat management is provided by blowing argon which also carries abalated rock particulate to the surface.
See the schematics here: the schematic here: https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/mi...
I think we can use 1 Gulf War for units
> it has successfully drilled to a depth of 100 meters, a milestone...
Nope that's a 0.1kilometerstone.
Or a hectometerstone, if you will
Does it vaporize the granite?
It turns it into granite cotton candy.
Finally we know how piramids were built
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