The following interview is a conversation we had with Elizabeth Muller, Deep Isolation, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $22M Raised to Build the Future of Nuclear Waste Disposal
Elizabeth Muller
Yeah, really happy to be here, Brett. Thank you.
Brett
No problem. So let’s begin with just a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Elizabeth Muller
Yeah, I grew up in Berkeley, California. So as a kid growing up here, I didn’t realize that Berkeley was as strange as I now recognize that it is. We sort of laughingly called it berserkly, but had a real bent towards the environment, had a real bent towards doing things that are good for the world. That’s sort of part of my dna. And at the same time, I also grew up with a professor of physics and a businesswoman as my parents. So I got the Berkeley, but I also got the more mainstream type of perspective. And this came to a clash many times in my life, particularly with regards to nuclear power.
Brett
And a few questions that we like to ask. And the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick. First one, what Founder and CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Elizabeth Muller
So the founders that I really admire the most are the ones that haven’t yet succeeded. I think once a Founder has succeeded, it’s so much easier to do a second business, to do a third business, to do a fourth one. Everyone wants to help you out and to make you successful. So the ones that I admire are those that haven’t gotten there yet and that are still in the muck and fighting that daily grind and don’t even know if they’re going to be successful one day.
Brett
Love that. And what about books? I know this is audio only, but in the pre interview we had video and I saw you have a massive collection of books back there. So how we like to frame this question. We stole this from Ryan Holiday, but he calls it a quake book. So he defined a quake book as a book that rocks you to your core and really influences how you think about the world. Do any books like that come to mind?
Elizabeth Muller
There’s one that I’ve just finished that rocked me to my core and is influencing how I’m thinking about things today. So this may not be my lifetime favorite book, but it’s really resonating right now. And it’s called the Messy Middle by Scott Belsky. And what I like about it is it talks about how difficult it is to get through that middle period of growing a company. At the beginning, the early stages, it’s all excitement and energy, and everything’s just amazing. And you have this powerful vision, and then you get to the middle and it just gets complicated. And you try something and it doesn’t quite work, and then you try something else, and maybe it does work, or maybe it doesn’t. And so I love the idea of this sort of messy middle as being a phase that all companies go through.
Brett
I follow him, but I didn’t realize that he had a book. Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to check that out. That sounds super interesting. He’s a fascinating entrepreneur and fascinating leader. Now, let’s dive deeper into Deep Isolation. So, I know I introduced it as a nuclear waste disposal solution. That’s a mouthful for me to say. And we haven’t had a lot of companies that I would say are anywhere close to this world that you’re in. So let’s just start with at a very high level, what do you do?
Elizabeth Muller
So nuclear waste disposal is something that has been an unsolved problem, at least for high level nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel. So as of today, nobody in the world has ever successfully disposed of spent nuclear fuel or high level waste. Now, there are some places where they’re making active progress, in particular in Finland and in Sweden. But this is still an unsolved problem. And I believe we must have nuclear power if we’re going to address climate change. And this unsolved nuclear waste problem is preventing that from happening. It is the number one reason that people oppose nuclear power, and Deep Isolation is looking to make the nuclear waste problem much easier to solve and hopefully be the first to actually get waste into disposal.
Brett
And can you talk to us about nuclear in general? What are some of the misconceptions that people have about nuclear energy?
Elizabeth Muller
So nuclear energy as it is used today is extremely safe. And I think that message is pretty well shared, certainly among the younger generations. There’s certainly among my parents generation, people who grew up in the fear of nuclear bombs and nuclear war and tend to conflate nuclear bombs with nuclear energy, of course, they’re not the same. They’re very different. And the peaceful use of nuclear energy is remarkably safe, in fact, much safer than many other sources of energy, such as coal or natural gas. Even so, nuclear is very safe, but it does have waste and the waste is potentially dangerous. Again, it’s not actually dangerous in the way that it is handled today, but it does need safe handling and it does need a disposal solution. And that’s something that’s the issue that still hasn’t been solved.
Brett
And I was just reading the headlines, I don’t remember the exact details, but what happened in France? Didn’t they have nuclear reactors and then they shut them down and then now they’re trying to turn them back on. Something along those lines. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Elizabeth Muller
So in France, they’ve had nuclear power for a really long time and they’re continuing to use nuclear power and sort of leaning in and doubling down on nuclear power. So they didn’t really turn them off. There was some maintenance that needed to happen. So they did turn some of the plants off temporarily while they were doing those maintenance, and they are turning that on. Those are coming back online now. So that might have been what you’re referring to.
Brett
Maybe it was Germany. Maybe France was the example of the ones that were very progressive. I thought there was some country in Europe that had, over the last ten years, completely shut down their energy. And then when the war with Ukraine and Russia happened, they were in a bind. But I could be.
Elizabeth Muller
That’s Germany. That is Germany. Germany has shut down all of their nuclear power plants, but they’re not planning on bringing them back, at least as of, you know, some of us that hope that might change at some point. But as of today, no, they’ve shut them all off.
Brett
And does that really just boil down to, for lack of better description, like a marketing problem? Like, is that a nuclear marketing problem?
Elizabeth Muller
So I think it is fundamentally a nuclear marketing problem, but I don’t think it’s a marketing problem that can be addressed just through marketing. So this is what the nuclear industry has been aiming to do for the past 30, 40 years. They explain why nuclear waste isn’t a big deal, why it’s very safe. The amount of waste that nuclear power plants generate is so small that nobody should really consider this as a reason for not having more nuclear power. Those arguments are true. It is very safe. The amount of waste generated is very small, and yet it doesn’t really answer the concerns over people who say well, okay, it may be safe now, but what are we going to do for the next generation? Is it really responsible for me to leave the solving of the disposal issue for my children?
Elizabeth Muller
I don’t want to do that. And so I think in order to solve this, we do need the marketing, but we also just need that waste disposal solution.
Brett
And you mentioned countries like Finland and Sweden there that were forward looking when it comes to waste, I believe. What are they getting right? How come they’re so much further ahead?
Elizabeth Muller
So they have a lot of trust in government. And the approach to nuclear waste disposal that everyone around the world had been taking prior to boreholes and prior to Deep Isolation was this idea of a mined repository. So this is a big underground mine where you can have trucks and people sort of bringing the waste into the mine, and then you leave it there and eventually you seal it up and you close it. The challenges with that is that nobody wants it in their backyard. Right? So where are you going to put this mine repository? How are you going to get the waste to the mine repository? And then the cost of it is such that really you can only have at most one, or maybe if you’re a big country, two per country.
Elizabeth Muller
The Finns and the Swedes have been successful at this because first of all, there’s a lot of trust in government. They have great engagement with their stakeholders and their local communities, and they’ve been able to afford the expensive cost of building these repositories.
Brett
Wow. Super interesting. And when it comes to your customers, then, and I hope this isn’t a dumb question, but it could be. Is it always countries and governments? There’s no private organizations that have nuclear waste, do they?
Elizabeth Muller
That’s correct. So there are private organizations that have responsibility for the waste on the temporary storage level. So maybe they’re the ones who generated the waste. Maybe they’re storing it for 1020 years until eventually it will need to be taken over by the government for ultimate disposal. And that’s because the waste is potentially dangerous for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years. And no private entity can guarantee anything for hundreds to thousands to millions of years. Whether governments can either is a relevant question, too. But it is the responsibility of governments to take ownership of the waste and deal with the waste disposal question.
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Now back today’s episode. And what’s that been like, selling to governments? Because this is not a little ecommerce widget that goes on a website or a cybersecurity software that a company could just install. This is serious stuff. And I think all startups struggle with trust and credibility in the early days. So what’s that been like, selling to governments? And what have you done to build that trust and credibility and earn that trust and credibility with them?
Elizabeth Muller
Yeah, selling to governments is hard. It’s especially hard when you’re looking at sort of a billion dollar disposal facility. Right? So this is not a decision that any government is going to go into lightly. It’s a careful process that takes years, really, for any decision to be made. Some of the steps that we’ve taken when we started out as a company, you can imagine a startup company in this space where we’re trying to sell a billion dollar solution to a government, is a really challenging one. But where we had our first early success was in doing something, doing multiple things that the industry had thought was impossible. And the first one that we did was a demonstration of our technology in 2019.
Elizabeth Muller
And this was important because the Department of Energy in the United States had attempted to do a demonstration of boreholes for disposal of nuclear waste not identical to ours, but somewhat similar to ours in the few years prior to the funding to the creation of Deep Isolation. And it had failed multiple times because of public protests and people not wanting this in their backyard, people saying, we don’t trust you to do a demonstration of this here. We think if you’re going to do a demonstration, you might actually want to bring in the waste next. We don’t want this. And so word on the street was nobody could ever do a demonstration of nuclear waste disposal in the United States, certainly not with community support. And so when we did it in 2019, that was our first miracle, if you will.
Elizabeth Muller
Even though it was small scale, even though it was not, we had somewhat limited scope in what were hoping to achieve with this demonstration. It was still a big milestone for the industry, and that led to partnerships with very established, significant companies. And then when were working with governments, it wasn’t know Crazy Liz and startup company, Deep Isolation, going in to talk to the governments. It was crazy Liz and her startup team that included some very big name companies who are now going out to meet with governments around this solution that has been accepted by the industry and that led to our first customer contracts and has led to sort of a fast building, trust building relationship with governments around the world.
Brett
And I saw the section on your website dedicated to community and community partnerships. What’s the incentive for the community to be part of this?
Elizabeth Muller
So I think the number one incentive is it does make the waste safer for the long term. So the waste where it is right now is safe. So I’m not saying that it isn’t, but it’s safe for 20 years, 40 years, 60 years, and it will require maintenance. The location where it is cannot be used for anything else. It can’t be greenfielded, and eventually it’s going to need to go to disposal. So it’s a temporary solution that doesn’t really allow the community to take back the ownership of the land. Deep Isolation, in contrast, can get rid of that waste, can get it off the ground, can get it deep underground where it’s completely isolated, and then you can greenfield the site where the waste was. So that’s a real advantage.
Elizabeth Muller
There’s a safety advantage and there’s a land use advantage for getting it off the ground. Now there are other advantages that can come with that too, particularly around the first communities. I think if they want economic, want some jobs, want to be a demonstration center for nuclear waste expertise and disposal, there’s a lot more that can go with that. But fundamentally, it’s a question of improving the safety and improving the lives of the people who live in that community.
Brett
And are there any critics to the approach that you take to disposing of the waste?
Elizabeth Muller
There are always critics. I think the biggest criticisms that we get is that this is just going to be too difficult, that we have a modular solution. We’re looking at micro repositories. They don’t have to be very big, they don’t have to be centralized. There are critics who say that the idea of having a micro repository, just as some critics of microreactors have similar, say similar things, it’s too hard to get it licensed when you’re not going to have a very large volume of waste. I don’t think we really get much in the way of critics when it comes to the safety record. I think it’s pretty convincing that if a mined repository is safe enough, we’re going three to five times deeper and taking the people out of underground.
Elizabeth Muller
So we don’t really get much in the way of criticism of the safety profile.
Brett
And as we’ve talked through. What I’ve really thought of is this is such a massive problem to solve. Have you always been attracted to solving big problems? Like when you were younger, were you always kind of looking for big problems like this? Or what was it about this problem that made you say, yes, I’ll go and try to tackle this massive problem that is going to be around for many years?
Elizabeth Muller
Yeah, I kind of hate to admit it, but I am attracted to these big problems. And I think part of it is if it’s a small problem, somebody else can do it. But if it’s a big problem and nobody else is trying to tackle it, I mean, obviously only if you have a vision for how to get it done. But if you do have a vision for getting it done and nobody else is doing it, well, that’s where you have the chance to really change the world.
Brett
Did you have any family or colleagues or Friends say that, like, Liz, can you just do a solar farm or do something that’s a bit more simple? Have you ever had any people close to you kind of push back on.
Elizabeth Muller
This, sort of laughingly? Yes. All the know, why would your first startup company tackle nuclear waste disposal? Why wouldn’t you start with something a little bit easier? And I admit part of me agrees with that too. Maybe I should have started with something a little bit easier.
Brett
Well, I’m happy that you’re doing it. I think the world will be happy. And it’s awesome to see you tackling such big problems. And it’s obviously really important for founders to do that. So great to have you there. Now I want to talk a little bit about your marketing as well. So I see you have a podcast. Can you talk to us about the podcast?
Elizabeth Muller
Yeah, we touched on this earlier. Education is one of the important pillars for moving forward with more nuclear power and addressing climate change. And while I mentioned that people are increasingly accepting of the nuclear safety profile, which is very safe for nuclear power, the understanding that there are nuclear waste disposal solutions that can be implemented effectively and efficiently, and it doesn’t take 30 to 50 years, is not something that most people know. And so the podcast is really an opportunity for us to bring in voices from all around the nuclear waste community and get their perspective on nuclear waste. Nuclear waste disposal. How long does it really need to take? What are the challenges? And also what do they think of the Deep Isolation solution? So it’s been a really fascinating series of conversations. I would absolutely encourage anyone to take a look.
Brett
And what about for funding? So I know we mentioned there that there’s 22 million that’s been disclosed so far. What have you learned about fundraising throughout your journey so far?
Elizabeth Muller
So I think it’s really important to enjoy the fundraising process because it takes so much time and there’s so many ups and downs. And if you don’t like it as a CEO, that’s a big part of your job. So I think from my perspective, you’ve just got to appreciate the quality of the conversations that you have. And I love it when people raise hard questions and it gives you an opportunity to think and to see if you really have all the answers that you think you do. So I would encourage anyone who’s considering fundraising to try and figure out what part of fundraising they can really enjoy and sort of lean into that and make it something that they can really love to do.
Brett
And if you were just starting the company again today, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d give to yourself?
Elizabeth Muller
I think that the company changes so much from one month to another and from one year to another. I think maybe a piece of advice would be, don’t think you know where you’re going to be in twelve months time, 24 months time, 36 months time. You can always plan for it. You need to have a plan. You need to have a vision. But how you get there is going to change. And so you want to build in the agility and the flexibility to continue to take advantage of new things as the world changes.
Brett
And final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the vision for the company?
Elizabeth Muller
So where we are right now, we are working on demonstrations. So we already have initial contracts with governments. We’ve gone in, we’ve looked at their waste inventory. We’ve looked at how we could dispose of it and the cost benefit of doing that. Now we need to go out and demonstrate how we would dispose of that particular inventory in that particular location. From that, we get to the actual disposal. So I think in three to five years, we would like to have a first disposal opportunity, concrete r1 location where we can begin putting waste into the deep underground.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, Liz, we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here. Before we do, if any Founder listening in wants to follow along with your journey as you tackle this massive problem, where should they go?
Elizabeth Muller
So they can always find me on LinkedIn? Elizabeth Muller. They can also reach out email, liz@deepisolation.com.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk about what you’re building and to share some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way. I really enjoyed the conversation and appreciate you taking the time.
Elizabeth Muller
Likewise, Brett. This has been fun.
Brett
All right, give in touch.
Brett
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