Architectural Consultancy  //  Nuclear Sector  //  Canada

Nuclear
Infrastructure,
Made Legible.

SDR is an architectural consultancy for the nuclear sector. We make nuclear infrastructure legible to the public — and we are retained by the organizations that need the public to understand them.

Engineering firms design the plant. Communications firms manage the message. Nobody designs the interface between a facility and the community that hosts it — and that interface is now a licensing-critical asset. SDR works there, upstream: before sites are fixed, programs are set, and the public has been told what to accept.

What we're retained for See the work
Fragment model — sealed process vessel suspended in a welded steel display frame Fragment Model — Sealed Process Vessel · The World We Fear
OPG
Sponsored
Engagement

Ontario Power Generation reviewed this body of work, named meaningful public engagement as a critical unresolved challenge in the federal Impact Assessment process — and backed SDR's public exhibition at 50% of ask.

The World We Fear
Art Gallery of Northumberland
Cobourg, ON — Opens Sept 7, 2026

01 — The Problem

The Interface Was Never Designed

Why an architectural consultancy belongs inside the nuclear sector's licensing problem.

Canada's nuclear supply chain is operationally excellent and publicly invisible. The industry pays for that invisibility constantly.

Every new nuclear development in Canada — beginning with the SMR program — must pass through the federal Impact Assessment process, where meaningful public engagement is a required component. The utilities leading that buildout have said, directly, that it is a gap they are struggling to close. Open houses produce attendance. Technical briefings produce compliance. Neither produces understanding.

The deeper problem is spatial. Facilities are optimized inward: sealed envelopes, no story, no civic expression. At Port Hope, most of the people who run the conversion facility don't live in the town that hosts it. At Kincardine, the station and the community function as separate worlds. The relationship between facility and town has never been fully designed — by anyone.

If these systems are as safe as the industry says, they should be able to stand beside the communities they serve. Showing what that looks like is architectural work — and it is the work that builds trust.

SDR closes that gap with the tools of architecture moved upstream: supply chain analysis, fragment drawing, physical modelling, and public exhibition — converting fear and indifference into serious questions, which is exactly what a defensible engagement record requires.

Ideogram section drawing — nuclear infrastructure integrated with public space, light register

Fig — Ideogram Section. A spatial proposition testing what changes when nuclear infrastructure is treated as an integrated civic system rather than a sealed utility.

02 — Services

What SDR Is Retained For

Four engagement types. Each tied to a problem the sector has already named.

SVC — 01Licensing · Community

Public Engagement Programs

Exhibitions, publications, and structured feedback mechanisms that make a facility or project legible to the people who live alongside it — designed and instrumented to generate a demonstrable record that real understanding was built, not just attendance counted.

Retained when: an Impact Assessment or CNSC process requires meaningful public engagement — and "meaningful" has to survive scrutiny.

SVC — 02Diagnostic · Strategy

The Blue Book

A commissioned dossier on a specific facility, site, or supply chain stage: supply chain analysis, regulatory and community mapping, fragment documentation, and spatial propositions. The brief before the brief — the document that defines what the project should be before anyone prices it.

Retained when: a siting, expansion, or community-relations decision needs to be understood spatially before it hardens.

SVC — 03Assets · Communication

Spatial Communication Assets

Large-format drawings, physical models, supply chain maps, and visualization series that translate operations into a language built for non-technical audiences. Owned by the client. Reusable across outreach, recruitment, and licensing contexts — civic assets, not one-time PR spends.

Retained when: a facility needs to be understood — by a community, a hearing, or a future workforce — and a brochure won't do it.

SVC — 04Advisory · Siting

Siting & Interface Advisory

Early-stage spatial counsel on how a proposed facility meets its host community: program adjacencies, public edges, thresholds, viewing lines, civic presence. The questions that determine whether proximity is an asset or a liability — asked before the site plan answers them by default.

Retained when: SMR siting makes proximity possible, and someone has to design what proximity looks like.

One boundary, held deliberately: SDR is not a communications agency. Communications firms manage perception of decisions already made; SDR designs the spatial and civic reality that perception is of. The drawings ask real questions and tolerate uncomfortable answers — which is precisely why the engagement record they produce holds up.

03 — Track Record

Stated Precisely

A short record, built inside controlled facilities and tested on skeptical audiences.

2025 Cameco — Port Hope Conversion Facility Access to a CNSC-licensed, security-controlled site, earned on the strength of preparation alone: a reading of permits, rezoning documents, shareholder reports, and process material thorough enough to merit a boardroom presentation and a facility tour with the operations, environment, and compliance leads. Site Access
2025 ICUCEC — Method Review The drawings and models were tested first with the Inter-Church Uranium Committee — a skeptical, anti-nuclear advocacy audience — and held the room. Engagement tools that only work on supporters are worthless in an impact assessment. These were built to work on the other side of it. Validated
2025 Bruce Power Region — Kincardine Field Study Documented study of the visitor experience and the facility–community relationship at an operating generation site: what the public is shown, what it isn't, and what the distance between station and town reveals about how engagement is currently designed. Field Study
2026 Ontario Power Generation — Sponsorship OPG reviewed the proposal, recognized it as addressing a problem they had named internally — meaningful public engagement as a critical unresolved IAA challenge — and funded the resulting public exhibition at 50% of ask. The target client naming the problem and paying toward the solution in the same conversation. Sponsored
Sept 2026 The World We Fear — AGN Cobourg Delivery of the OPG-backed engagement: a public exhibition at the Art Gallery of Northumberland, inside OPG's own host-community geography, instrumented with structured feedback mechanisms so the outcome is measurable — comprehension, reaction, and record. Opens Sept 7

Every line above survives a phone call to the organization named. That is the standard this practice holds its claims to.

04 — The Work

Case Study 01: The Nuclear Fuel Cycle

Eight parts. Each contains Systems, Design, and Research layers. Open a part to enter the file.

The World We Fear: Architecture & Nuclear Imagination is SDR's founding demonstration — a complete application of the method across Canada's nuclear fuel supply chain, from the Athabasca Basin to Port Hope. It is the R&D base of the practice: every drawing, model, and map below was built the way client work is built — from primary documents, site access, and supply chain analysis — and tested on real audiences, sympathetic and hostile alike.

Sectional drawing — underground mining system beneath the surface

Section Study

Fragment drawing — Moissan fluorine cell, analytical exploded view

Fragment Drawing

Fragment drawing — jet boring system, analytical exploded view

Systems Analysis

Fragment model — jet boring system in steel display frame

Model Study

Part Stage Location Status Open
01 Exploration & Mining Athabasca Basin, SK
Systems Design Research
→
02 Milling & Processing Key Lake, SK / Blind River, ON
Systems Design Research
→
03 Conversion & Enrichment Port Hope, ON / Eunice, NM
Systems Design Research
→
04 Fuel Fabrication Port Hope / Cambridge, ON
Forthcoming
—
05 Power Generation Darlington / Pickering, ON
Forthcoming
—
06 Distribution & Use Ontario Grid
Forthcoming
—
07 Spent Fuel Management NWMO — Ignace, ON
Forthcoming
—
08 Decommission & Decay Multiple Sites
Forthcoming
—

Parts 04–08 are in development. Part 07 — Spent Fuel Management — addresses the highest-stakes public engagement problem in Canadian nuclear.

05 — Method

The Five-Part Process

A repeatable method, applied per supply chain stage. Select a step to read it.

Architecture's Upstream Position

Architecture usually arrives after the major decisions are made — site selected, program fixed, risk priced. SDR works at the earlier moment, where the structural analogue is not another design firm but the early advisory model of investment banking: develop embedded knowledge of one industry, identify value it cannot see from inside its own operations, and originate the brief rather than wait to receive one. The banker's product is the blue book. SDR's is its architectural equivalent — a rigorously argued case for a spatial relationship that does not yet exist.

Process

  1. I. Architectural Letter of Position
  2. II. Supply Chain Analysis
  3. III. Fragment Drawing & Modeling
  4. IV. Composite Ideogram
  5. V. Ideogram Detailing
Counter current decantation — analytical fragment drawing, dark register

Fig — Counter Current Decantation. The fragment drawing is not illustrative; it is analytical. It argues for the spatial intelligence embedded in the machine.

06 — Exhibition

The World We Fear

SDR's first delivered public engagement — sponsored by Ontario Power Generation.

Architecture & Nuclear Imagination opens at the Art Gallery of Northumberland this September — the first time this body of work meets a public with no obligation to engage with it.

Large-format fragment drawings, physical models, supply chain maps, and ideograms — including work revealed for the first time on opening day. The exhibition is built as engagement infrastructure, not display: structured feedback mechanisms run throughout, so what visitors understand, question, and push back on becomes a measurable record.

Cobourg is not a neutral venue. It is where the people who run the Port Hope conversion facility actually live — host-community geography, chosen deliberately.

Venue

Art Gallery of Northumberland, Cobourg ON

Opens

September 7, 2026

Sponsor

Ontario Power Generation

Enquiries

Contact SDR →

Ideogram section — proposed integration of nuclear infrastructure and public space

Fig — Ideogram in Section. What a publicly-engaged version of this infrastructure could look like.

Ideogram study model in wood

Ideogram study model

Ideogram study model, white, under directional light

Ideogram study model II

Refuge chamber fragment model held in hand

Fragment model — at hand scale

Conversion fragment model in steel display frame

Fragment model — framed for exhibition

07 — Principal

Founded by Simon Martignago

Why the practice exists, in the founder's words.

I founded SDR because nuclear is among the cleanest, safest, and steadiest energy we know how to produce — and energy is one of the things that actually makes a country.

Reliable, domestic energy is a foundation a nation is built on: it holds prices steady, supports work across an entire supply chain, and gives a country room to act on its own terms. Nuclear is one of Canada's last great productive assets, and a real chance to lead. The technical case is already strong. What's missing is a public that can live alongside it with trust rather than distance.

That gap is an architectural problem, and it's the one SDR exists to close — using design to integrate nuclear into communities so it's understood, not hidden, and to help build Canada back as an energy leader its people are glad to live with. This practice is the start of that work.

Principal Simon D. Martignago
Education M.Arch — Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University
Recognition Helena & Jerzy Boraks Graduate Bursary
Background Cameco Port Hope Conversion Facility · Kincardine / Bruce region · ICUCEC review · supply chain documentation, Athabasca Basin to Port Hope
Based Toronto, Ontario — Canada
Domain Nuclear energy infrastructure — architecture, legibility & public engagement

08 — Contact

Start a Conversation

Engagement enquiries, exhibition visits, or a question about the work — it comes straight to the principal.

Systems
Design
Research

simon@sdr-research.com
Based Toronto, Ontario — Canada
Sector Nuclear utilities, fuel cycle & vendor organizations, emerging reactor companies
Exhibition The World We Fear — Art Gallery of Northumberland, Cobourg. Opens Sept 7, 2026.

If you're weighing an engagement, the fastest start is a short note describing the facility, the process stage, and the decision in front of you. A scoped response follows within the week.

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