Can Horizontal Boreholes Solve Nuclear's Biggest Problem? Rod Baltzer Thinks So

What if the key to unlocking nuclear energy’s future has been buried all along?

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy, host Wes Ashworth dives into one of the most overlooked and misunderstood challenges of the clean energy transition: nuclear waste disposal.

His guest, Rod Baltzer, is a 25-year veteran of the nuclear waste industry and now CEO of Deep Isolation, a company pioneering deep horizontal borehole disposal for spent nuclear fuel. With a background in finance and a career spanning public and private sector leadership, Rod brings a rare combination of technical insight, regulatory experience, and business acumen to an issue most would rather ignore.

For decades, the nuclear industry has lacked a permanent solution for high-level waste, relying instead on short-term storage and costly, politically stalled mined repository concepts. Deep Isolation offers a radically different approach: leveraging proven directional drilling technology from oil and gas to safely and affordably isolate nuclear waste more than a mile underground, horizontally, in stable geologic formations.

Rod breaks down:

• Why traditional mined repositories are 70% more expensive and far slower to implement
• How horizontal boreholes can isolate waste for over a million years with peak doses lower than a single banana per year
• What Deep Isolation’s universal canister makes possible across fuel types, reprocessing, and storage
• Why the real bottleneck isn’t technology, but outdated U.S. policy stuck on Yucca Mountain
• How countries like Estonia and others in Eastern Europe are leapfrogging the U.S. with forward-looking nuclear strategies

This episode also tackles widespread myths, including the “green goo” misconception, and explains why transportation concerns persist, even though nuclear waste has an extraordinary safety record.

Rod shares why the nuclear industry can’t afford to treat waste as an afterthought any longer, and why solving it now is essential to ensuring nuclear’s role in a clean energy future.

If you're curious about the back end of the nuclear lifecycle and how it may be the unlock for scaling next-gen clean power, this conversation delivers both a reality check and a hopeful vision for what's possible.

Links

Rod Baltzer on LinkedIn

Deep Isolation's Website

YouTube Video - Rocket Powered Train Impact Test of Spent Nuclear Fuel Shipping Cask

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/