Big Oil Perfected Sideways Drilling. A Startup Wants to Do the Same With Nuclear Waste

The thorny puzzle of how to store nuclear waste that will pose a danger to humanity for at least the next 10,000 years has historically been the kind of thing that governments turn to science fiction to help solve. Back in the 1980s, for example, the Department of Energy (DOE) considered burying spent radioactive fuel within eldritch concrete monuments—isolated foreboding structures built to last as long as Stonehenge, with ominous pictograms and even a new cross-cultural mythology inspired by the…