MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4413834882 · doi:10.24908/iqurcp19108

Navigating Net Zero: Finding Safe Storage for Nuclear Waste in Ontario

2025· article· en· W4413834882 on OpenAlexvenueaboutno aff
T. Powell

Bibliographic record

VenueInquiry Queen s Undergraduate Research Conference Proceedings · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicNuclear and radioactivity studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsZero (linguistics)Net (polyhedron)Environmental scienceWaste managementRadioactive wasteZero wasteSafety netBusinessEngineeringMathematicsEnvironmental healthMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

To meet the growing demand for electricity in Ontario, the federal and the provincial governments are expanding nuclear power generation in Ontario. Part of these expansion plans include developing North America’s first small modular reactor (SMR) at the Darlington New Nuclear Project site (Small modular reactors: Darlington SMR 2024). While cheaper and easier to build than traditional reactors, researchers at Stanford University and the University of British Columbia have found that SMRs produce more nuclear waste per unit of energy compared to traditional reactors as a result of increased neutron leakage (Liou, 2023 ; Krall et al., 2022). Nuclear power is a large step towards achieving net-zero but this expansion makes finding more storage for the nuclear waste produced increasingly necessary (2030 Emissions Reduction Plan – Sector-by-sector overview 2024). This project assesses appropriate sites in Ontario to establish a new nuclear waste disposal site. A GIS analysis will be predominantly relied upon to create a model to evaluate various layers and site characteristics. Factors currently being assessed in the model are groundwater, potential disturbances to the land (ie. current or future mining activity), and whether the lands are federally or provincially protected lands. The Province is split into 71 districts, in accordance with the Ecosystems of Ontario Ecodistricts. These districts are then either included or excluded in the model based on the development of their aquifers and whether the land contains any natural resources that are currently, or could be, mined. The remaining Ecodistricts are then overlain with protected lands and the remaining sites are usable. Preliminary results have shown sites available are predominantly in northern Ontario. Future factors that will be incorporated into the model include a soil and geology suitability assessment and an accessibility assessment, using existing road access to the site as the criteria for this factor. ReferencesKrall, L. M., Macfarlane, A. M., & Ewing, R. C. (2022). Nuclear waste from small modular reactors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(23). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2111833119Liou, J. (2023, September 13). What are small modular reactors (smrs)?. IAEA. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrsSmall modular reactors: Darlington SMR. OPG. (2024, December 4). https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/smr/darlington-smr/

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.246
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.073
GPT teacher head0.348
Teacher spread0.275 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueInquiry Queen s Undergraduate Research Conference ProceedingsSame topicNuclear and radioactivity studiesFrench-language works237,207