Thermal Salt Sealing System, Phase I

Long-term disposal of nuclear waste continues to be an issue of national and international importance. A 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission report to the Secretary of Energy states, .“..this nation’s failure to come to grips with the nuclear waste issue has already proved damaging and costly and it will be more damaging and more costly the longer it continues….” The proposed thermal salt sealing project provides a unique opportunity to develop a technology that can be used to isolate nuclear waste within a deep, impermeable underground salt formation. The knowledge acquired from this project has the potential to significantly contribute to the U.S. Department of Energy Used Fuel Disposition Campaign. The overall goal of this project is to design, test, and validate the thermal salt sealing system for nuclear waste disposal and conventional well plugging and abandonment. To achieve this goal, the project Work Plan will include three tasks: (1) numerical modeling of the thermal salt sealing process, (2) development and bench testing of several prototype borehole heaters, and (3) in situ field testing and post-analysis of the system within an active salt mine. As an outcome of these tasks, we expect to provide the U.S. Department of Energy and private industry with a thermal salt sealing technology that can create an impermeable and impervious barrier of native salt.The primary commercialization opportunity for our technology will likely occur through well plugging and abandonment in the salt cavern industry. Several thousand underground salt caverns have been solution-mined throughout the world. As these caverns age, they eventually reach the end of their economic life and must be plugged and abandoned to ensure human safety and avoid environmental risk. However, a suitable long-term solution does not currently exist for plugging and abandoning salt cavern wells. By developing and deploying our proposed thermal salt sealing technology, we will provide a suitable plugging-and-abandonment solution for salt cavern wells and capitalize this opportunity, while also protecting the environment and human safety.