Warren Harper

Ontario’s Nuclearscapes, From the Cradle to the Grave

On November 28, 2024, it was announced that the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation-Ignace area in Ontario is to be the site of Canada’s deep geological repository, where the nation state will emplace its nuclear waste several hundred metres underground for generations to come. Due to open in the 2040s it will be where much of Canada’s current 3.2 million nuclear waste bundles (with more continually produced) are to be taken.

In Canada all their nuclear reactors but one are based in Ontario and the only Canadian case study used by the Anthropocene Working Group, Kionywarihwaen (Crawford Lake), is also in the province about an hour and a half outside of Toronto. The lake is meromictic, meaning the bottom and top layers of water do not intermix. Due to this distinct quality, the working group has been studying the lake’s sediment which has evidence of the emergence of the nuclear bomb, with traces from the nuclear weapons testing by the US that started with Trinity. Not only this, as of 2022, 12.5 million kilograms of uranium hexafluoride is produced in Port Hope and figures in the uranium enrichment process for nuclear fuel reactors and weapons.

For 2025 I’ll be starting a new body of research on Ontario’s nuclearscapes, from the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation, across to Kionywarihwaen (Crawford Lake), over to Port Hope, and wherever else it leads. The forthcoming curatorial explorations will seek to respond to and make sense of Ontario’s nuclearscapes, how they are mutable, diffuse and interconnected. How they traverse contexts and localities whilst operating on various scales. Granted, this is much like other nuclearscapes across the globe; however, this curatorial research will seek to uncover the distinctness of Ontario in the nuclear complex and the capacity for artists to respond to this.