Ian D. Clark

Faculty of Science

Bury it. The Green Solution for Nuclear Waste

Tuesday, September 25, 2012
7:00 p.m.
Room 4007, Faculty of Social Sciences Building
120 University. Map

The President's Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Ian Clark, expert in geosciences and professor at the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Science.

Is nuclear power a safe and sustainable energy solution? The answer depends in part on the ability to safely isolate radioactive waste in a deep geological repository.

In his talk as part of the President's Lecture Series, Dr. Ian D. Clark will discuss how advances in geo-science can help demonstrate that groundwaters carry no risk of circulating waste radionuclides to the surface, and how the University of Ottawa's Advanced Research Complex will make ground-breaking research on this question possible.

  Watch this lecture.

Biography:

Ian D. Clark is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa and director of the Hatch Isotope Laboratory, one of Canada's leading analytical facilities. Professor Clark completed his graduate studies at the University of Waterloo and at the Université de Paris-Sud (Orsay) in isotope hydrogeology and paleoclimatology.

The analytical facilities that Clark and his colleagues are establishing in the new Advanced Research Complex at the University of Ottawa are unique in Canada and the foundation for the research of Clark's group. His research spans hydrogeological settings ranging from permafrost dynamics in the Arctic, impacts of agricultural activities on water resources, to the dispersion and geological isolation of radionuclides from nuclear activities. Current research with the Nuclear Waste Management Organization focuses on deep crustal fluids and the safety of proposed nuclear waste repositories.

Professor Clark has been involved with the International Atomic Energy Agency in the development of investigative methods as well as the teaching of environmental isotopes in hydrology. His book (co-authored with Professor Peter Fritz) Environmental Isotopes in Hydrogeology, won the Choice Magazine Outstanding Textbook award.