It might not exactly be a point of no return, but it’s a milestone nonetheless: Ontario is moving forward with the construction of four small modular nuclear reactors at the site of the existing Darlington nuclear power station. When complete, the fission four-pack will generate 1,200 megawatts of power at a cost of over $20 billion. The price tag alone is eyebrow-raising: refurbishments at Bruce and Darlington will cost $25 billion (in 2017 dollars) but are keeping roughly 10,000 megawatts online. Even the recent decision to extend the life of the Pickering nuclear station will itself contribute 2,200 megawatts to the grid.
The good news (if everything goes as planned) is that the entire point of small modular reactors is that they can be made over and over again so that Ontario’s workforce can get really good at building them, bringing the cost of construction down and potentially opening up new markets for nuclear power. Ontario Power Generation projects that the first BWRX-300 module, designed by GE-Hitachi, will cost $6.1 billion, with the fourth falling in cost to $4.1 billion.
The government projects that these SMRs will help fill the gap of new capacity that Ontario needs by 2050. The province expects 18,000 megawatts of new nuclear to come online in the next 25 years; 1,200 of those will come from the Darlington SMRs. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the Pickering refurbishment, the new generation at Bruce (4,000-5,000 megawatts), or the recently announced new station in Port Hope (as much as 10,000 megawatts). For Ontario, Big Nuclear is still going to be the preponderant source of new power.
(It’s worth noting that the same report that called for nearly 18,000 megawatts of new nuclear power by 2050 also called for 6,000 megawatts of new solar power and 17,600 megawatts of new wind power to decarbonize Ontario’s power sector. The Ford government, will, I’m sure, get around to making high-profile announcements about all the new renewables they’re commissioning any day now.)
While SMRs aren’t expected to play a huge role in Ontario’s power sector going forward, there is at least the outline of a plan for their future. Other provinces are seeing surging demand for electricity just as surely as this one is. If they’re honest, nobody minds having this particular problem: increased electricity demand is a pretty consistent indicator that the economy is humming along nicely, from large industrial employers investing in more production, to new data centres coming online, to consumers buying more things that need electricity — particularly if they’re buying electric cars or switching their home heating to an electric heat pump.
Saskatchewan has already named the BWRX-300 as a potential source of new power in that province, and New Brunswick is being advised to consider its own options after difficulty with a separate SMR vendor. Beyond Canada, GE-Hitachi has an agreement with Poland to deploy 10 SMRs through the 2030s.
While the Poland agreement is the most concrete so far, it’s also the one that raises the biggest questions about Ontario’s hopes for this endeavour. Will Canadian (read: Ontarian) workers actually benefit from an agreement between a U.S. firm and a European government? Yes, Ontario firms will be able to accurately say they’ve got the only real-world experience in building these reactors. But both Polish and American governments have a strong incentive to make sure their own voters benefit as much as possible from this, and the current U.S. administration has inaugurated an age of shameless protectionism, so it’s fair to at least wonder if this will work.
I’ve previously raised more security-minded concerns about the choice to go with GE-Hitachi, because of its U.S.-controlled technology and because it makes Ontario dependent on enriched uranium fuel we don’t make domestically. To those points, OPG says it can procure enriched uranium from non-U.S. sources and (less cheerily) even CANDU reactors contain critical parts that are provided by U.S. contractors: so there’s at least no new risk to going with a GE-Hitachi reactor. Given the current state of U.S. politics, that’s not entirely reassuring.
If the security risks aren’t a show-stopper — and they seem not to be — that still leaves the questionable financial justification. Ontario ratepayers are being asked to bear real up-front costs for somewhat speculative future gains premised entirely on our workers winning an advantage to meet huge changes to the global electricity sector. It is, ironically enough, very similar to the arguments the Ontario Liberals made for wooing renewable energy to Ontario nearly a generation ago. For our wallets’ sake, if nothing else, we should all hope that this experiment goes better than the last one.