A lot of websites claim to be “living documents.” The Canadian Nuclear FAQ has receipts.
Visit the Canadian Nuclear FAQ
Dr. Jeremy Whitlock says the site was established in April 1996 as an unofficial, privately maintained collection of frequently asked questions about Canadian nuclear science and technology, especially CANDU reactors.
The homepage was still being updated in August 2026.
That is three decades of one technical website refusing to die.
The FAQ format when FAQ meant something
The structure is gloriously old-fashioned.
The main index is divided into subjects such as CANDU technology, the Canadian nuclear industry, costs and benefits, safety and liability, waste management, security and non-proliferation, uranium, research reactors, other research and development, and further information.
Then come actual questions.
What does CANDU mean? How does a CANDU reactor work? What is heavy water? How does on-power refuelling work? Why does the design have a positive void coefficient? How is nuclear waste managed in Canada? What happened in the 1952 NRX accident? Can CANDU reactors use alternative fuel cycles? What role has Canada played in isotope production?
This is what a real FAQ looked like before the phrase got reduced to five accordion boxes written by marketing.
Whitlock is also unusually clear about provenance and bias. The site states that it is unofficial and that its answers do not necessarily represent Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, the Canadian Nuclear Society, or the nuclear industry generally.
That disclosure matters because Whitlock is not a random hobbyist. His biography says he earned a PhD in Engineering Physics from McMaster University specializing in CANDU reactor physics, worked for AECL and later Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, served in nuclear safeguards, and from 2017 to 2025 worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
So the site sits in an interesting category: personal, unofficial publishing backed by deep professional expertise.
That combination used to be one of the Web’s great strengths.
A subject-matter expert could maintain a public reference indefinitely without waiting for an institution to approve every paragraph or redesign the entire thing because somebody discovered rounded cards.
The page even retains a fossil from an earlier Internet layer: a Nuclear InfoRing WebRing section. The technical content kept evolving while some of the surrounding navigation culture froze in amber.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is built to surface exactly these long-lived specialist references—the places where expertise accumulated slowly enough that replacing them with a generic search result would be a downgrade.
Thirty years later, the Canadian Nuclear FAQ still does the job implied by its name.
That sounds ordinary until you remember how little of the 1996 Web survived long enough to update its footer in 2026.