Burying nuclear waste, exposing nuclear authority: Canada's nuclear waste disposal concept and expert-lay discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates Canada's debates about nuclear waste disposal, concentrating on the public inquiry into a nuclear waste disposal concept (held 1996-97). My evidence is an analysis of public inquiry transcripts, plus industry and Government documents (produced since 1954). My focus is on disputes about what the issue was that was in contention. I identify several different ways in which the issue in dispute was framed, specifically how expert and public groups enacted competing framings. I show that proponents of the waste disposal concept shifted grounds in terms of how they framed the issue: from solving the nuclear waste problem as intimately connected to ensuring a future for commercial nuclear power, to separating these two issues. Proponents also initially excluded the public from involvement in decision-making, but in contemporary times they embrace public involvement. This shift was mediated by declining support for nuclear power in general, as well as failures to retain control over the terms of debate and assessment themselves. Disposal concept supporters framed the issue as one of how to proceed in the face of technical uncertainty, and have thus marginalized deficiencies in present-day evidence for safe disposal by arguing future site-specific investigations will resolve all technical issues. This 'viable in principle' defense has been strenuously opposed by public opposition groups, who have framed the issue as involving more than just narrow questions of concept feasibility and safe disposal. Public critics have framed the issue as intimately connected with the legitimacy of present-day democratic procedures for ensuring the accountability of decisions. An analysis of the history of these competing framings suggests that much skepticism should attend recent nuclear industry claims to be accountable to public feedback. I also draw upon this history to comment upon debates about what is more salient: public capacities as experts or public rights as citizens. I show that ensuring democratic accountability, rather than just representation, has been an underlying political demand of public opposition groups, and that their main concern has been with the very ability to negotiate what the nuclear waste disposal issue ought to mean.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".