In central Texas, near the town of Cameron—population 5,300—a gravel road leads past a security gate bearing a sign that reads, "Watch out for the cows." The warning is literal: cattle frequently block the road, delaying visitors heading toward a massive oil-drilling rig. A worker in red Halliburton coveralls and a helmet offers additional caution: beware of snakes and scorpions. "Not trying to scare you; that's just part of the orientation," he says.

This is the Deep Borehole Demonstration Center, home to a partnership between the nuclear waste startup Deep Isolation Nuclear, the oilfield services leader Halliburton, and other collaborators. Their shared objective: solve the nation's nuclear waste disposal problem in time to support a renaissance of next-generation nuclear energy driven by the construction boom of AI data centers, whose electricity demands have already prompted major technology companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to announce nuclear energy deals.

The partners intend to use modern, directional oil-drilling techniques to bury radioactive waste permanently—roughly 2 miles underground—in specially designed, 5,000-pound canisters.

"To make sure we have a good path for new nuclear, we need to make sure we take care of the waste," said Deep Isolation CEO Rod Baltzer. "We can go twice as deep as a typical [mined nuclear waste] repository, and then follow a formation that's been out of touch with the surface for a million years."

The Scale of the Waste Problem

To date, more than 95,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel—and rising—sit in temporary storage across approximately 80 sites in over 30 states, with no permanent disposal facilities available. Nuclear power currently supplies roughly 19% of U.S. electricity, meaning the waste issue is tied directly to a significant slice of the nation's current energy mix—not just future reactors.

A decades-long effort to develop a controversial, nationwide waste repository in the Nevada desert at Yucca Mountain has largely failed, and the federal government continues to grapple with how to proceed. Globally, only Finland has licensed and built a deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel—Posiva's Onkalo facility, expected to begin operations around 2025—underscoring how far behind the U.S. and most other nations remain on permanent disposal. In July, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) named five states—Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah—as finalists for "Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses" focused on nuclear fuel recycling and waste. Even if recycling technology proves viable, residual waste will still require disposal.

Deep Isolation believes it has the solution: drilling boreholes near nuclear plants—or anywhere else—for safe disposal. "You can put it where the waste is generated," Baltzer said.

Bridging Two Industries

The concept of combining oil-drilling and nuclear waste techniques was first considered roughly 40 years ago, but the technology and economics were not feasible at the time. The idea is now being revisited, driven in part by the energy sector's advances in drilling much longer wells, including horizontal drilling, to extract more crude oil from geological rock formations.

A key feature of Deep Isolation's approach is that the buried nuclear waste canisters can be retrieved in case of emergency.

Baltzer told Fortune that no one in the nuclear industry fully appreciated the massive technological advancements made in oil drilling over the past 10 to 20 years. "Everybody in oil and gas was like, 'We do this every day,'" he said. "And everybody in nuclear went, 'Holy cow, I did not know you could do this and retrieve it. That's amazing.' We realized there was this disconnect—they just weren't talking to each other."

Jesse Sloane, Deep Isolation's executive vice president of engineering, said timing is critical as the AI race escalates. The Trump administration has committed to a fourfold increase in nuclear power by 2050.

"You can't do that without answering the question of, 'Well, what do you do with the waste?'" Sloane said.

Demonstration Phase

Early next year, Halliburton will drill the first test well—using an extra-large drill bit—to go thousands of feet underground both vertically and horizontally. The team will then demonstrate that a crane can reach back into the well and retrieve each canister one at a time.

"The nuclear community really wants to see us physically do something at scale and at depth here before they can really get behind it and understand how simple it really is," said Andy Griffith, executive director of the demonstration center and former deputy assistant secretary of nuclear energy at the DOE.

"Even today, people are saying, 'Well, I don't know, it's so risky. What if it gets stuck? What if the seal doesn't work?'" Griffith continued. "And the oil and gas industry people are like, 'This is not a big deal.' But for people that are unfamiliar, they want to see it done. And that's what we're doing here. And they'll be more open to it, I think."

The shale oil boom was revolutionized partly by drilling vertically and then horizontally to access deeper subsurface shale rock and release trapped liquids. The same techniques will be applied here—except to carry nuclear waste canisters farther from the surface and wellhead.

A common misconception, including within the oil industry itself, is that vertical-then-horizontal drilling creates an "L" shape. In reality, the well may be drilled nearly 1 mile deep and then curved at a rate of roughly 4 degrees every 100 feet.

"It's a very gradual bend," Griffith said. "If you're looking down a 4-degree-per-100-foot bend, you can't tell it's bent in any given section because it's so gradual."

Engineering Challenges

While the oil industry now routinely drills 4-mile-long horizontal wells, replicating this feat for nuclear waste disposal presents significant engineering challenges.

A typical oil well is drilled about 8 inches wide near the bottom. The nuclear waste well will require a diameter of approximately 22 inches—nearly triple the standard size. This necessitates using a larger drill bit than normal, followed by a tool called a "hole opener" to expand the width further.

Jason Foreman, Halliburton's North America region manager, described the undertaking as both "interesting" and "fun."

"We drill wells all around the world in various combinations of challenges, and we do it every day," Foreman told Fortune. "This project pulls them all together, which makes it a unique challenge."

"It's a combination that includes the depth that we're going to, the deviation, the horizontal well, the diameter of the hole, and the abrasive formation that we're going through," he continued. "Those things together create a unique challenge that we're not sure has been done before."

Drilling wells for these 15-foot nuclear waste canisters is expensive, but Deep Isolation is betting that the economics will prove far cheaper than building massive repositories such as Yucca Mountain.

Foreman acknowledged that Halliburton is relatively new to the AI and nuclear industries, but emphasized that the work remains fundamentally about "well construction." Nuclear is "another source of energy," and Halliburton is in the energy business, he said. "From our perspective, it's a well. In this market, they're entering a realm that Halliburton lives and breathes in."

Company Background and Momentum

Deep Isolation was founded a decade ago by Liz Muller and her physicist father, Richard Muller. They recruited Baltzer, a longtime nuclear waste executive, to join them in 2018.

Liz Muller handed the CEO role to Baltzer in 2024—just as momentum was building—to start a sister company, Deep Fission, which is developing small modular nuclear reactors designed to operate underground as well.

Deep Isolation went public in July on the over-the-counter venture market, OTCQB, with a market cap of nearly $300 million. However, the company still needs to complete its demonstration project, attract additional capital, and work through regulatory issues before it can scale, Baltzer acknowledged.

"After spending 25 years in the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle with waste, this is the most interest I've ever seen," Baltzer said.

Last month, the DOE selected Deep Isolation for three grants, alongside the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of South Carolina, as part of the Trump administration's "Genesis Mission" to leverage AI for "energy dominance." The grants will fund studies on AI modeling for optimal nuclear waste disposal site screening and design.

Regulatory and Political Hurdles

Despite these advancements, the biggest hurdle may be the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which essentially bars any permanent nuclear waste disposal licensing outside of Yucca Mountain—a project that is now effectively defunct. The Trump administration and Congress are actively weighing potential solutions. Since 2015, the DOE has also pursued a consent-based siting process, inviting communities to volunteer as hosts for interim storage facilities, though that initiative has yet to yield a licensed site.

The path forward is not straightforward. Although sentiment has swung back in favor of nuclear power, many communities remain skeptical of nuclear power plants in their areas, let alone nuclear waste disposal facilities. This is why centralizing waste storage in rural Nevada was long considered the path of least resistance.

Furthermore, the safety of Deep Isolation's approach must still be definitively proven, even if the concept works well on paper.

International Prospects and Timeline

Baltzer acknowledged that Deep Isolation may need to develop its first commercial project internationally. The company is actively engaged with Bulgaria and other potential partners. The initial project—wherever it is located—is unlikely to come online until the early 2030s. That timing could still align with the anticipated nuclear renaissance, provided the U.S. regulatory system is reformed before then.

"We want to bring our communities out, our regulators out, and let them kick the tires, and see how it works," Baltzer said.

For now, visitors to the Deep Borehole Demonstration Center in central Texas can see the work firsthand—provided they remember to watch for cattle, snakes, and scorpions along the way.