A map of the potential Deep Geological Repository site to store Canada's spent nuclear fuel in South Bruce. (image supplied by Nuclear Waste Management Organization)
A specialist from Deloitte says that his team is working to compile data from a recent opinion survey about a deep geological repository for nuclear waste.
Chris Bandak, Managing Director of Economic Advisory Services is also refuting claims that there is a glitch in the survey to allow people to respond multiple times.
He says that each participant was given a specific personal identification number, that they could use to sign into the survey and share their thoughts on the project.
“In order to make the survey accessible to everyone, we provide PINs. And so all those PINs, now not for South Bruce but internally at Deloitte, we can track all of the participations and the PINs entered. If a PIN is entered multiple times, those completed surveys are discarded.”
Bandak says that there was also concern about the end date of the survey, which he explained to Bayshore News that because the original survey was set to close at midnight on Friday, there wasn’t anyone around to digitally close it until Monday morning.
He also explained that the end date and time were merely put in place to motivate people to respond to the survey in a timely manner.
Bandak says that when the survey finally closed, the team found that only one person attempted to answer the survey more than once.
“There was, in fact, only one IP address in particular that had multiple participation attempts.”
As the company only counts the first response from any particular digital participant, any repeat tries don’t count.
Bandak says that they have safeguards in place to prevent people from answering the survey multiple times to skew the data.
He adds that the reason that they issue PIN codes that people use to respond is because it’s fewer steps than making people register with their email address and creating a password, which can lead to issues of forgetting login information.
Such issues can cause people to become frustrated, and avoid participating in the survey altogether.
As for the suspicion that there was a so-called glitch in the survey, Bandak says there isn’t, and they’ve never had one before.
“This is actually the first time ever that we’ve had complaints like this.”
The results of the survey regarding the DGR will be presented to South Bruce council once they have been compiled by Deloitte.