Given there aren’t any VCR or Zeppelin factories left to spend taxpayer money on, the Ford government has decided to spend it instead on another outdated technology. As the world moves away from nuclear power toward safer, cheaper renewable alternatives, Doug Ford is shifting Ontario into reverse, setting the province back 30 years or more, both environmentally and economically.
That the planned rebuilding of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station is being marketed to Ontario voters as a step forward on either climate change or the province’s bottom line is as clear an indication as ever that the government doesn’t much respect our intelligence.
Nuclear power is the most expensive energy money can buy: one kilowatt-hour of new nuclear costs five to 13 times more than a kilowatt-hour of new solar or wind. And every dollar spent on nuclear is one that’s not being used to buy less expensive, fully renewable energy systems that could help decarbonize the province right now.
Energy Minister Todd Smith’s announcement last Tuesday was full of fuzzy math and fuzzy thinking.
To begin with, calling this a refurbishment project is misleading. Pickering isn’t just the oldest nuclear-power plant in Canada — it’s one of the oldest in the entire world. While refurbishment implies a superficial improvement or aesthetic enhancement, Pickering is going to require something much more involved. A similar project at the Darlington plant was described in PowerMagazine as involving the “removal, replacement, and repair of core components.”
This isn’t a new coat of paint. It’s a reconstruction whose cost is likely to be in the tens of billions of dollars.
Smith also used the term “intermittent” when describing renewables. It’s a common misconception that nuclear-power plants can run all the time, whereas solar and wind plants offer only intermittent power due to cloud cover or low windspeed. This ignores the fact that nuclear reactors are deeply intermittent — frequently shut down for such things as routine maintenance, safety inspections, refuelling, and even for key safety issues — such as those that shut down half the French nuclear fleet for much of 2022. While there’s no such thing as a free lunch, renewable variability is supplemented by evolving storage technologies. During Alberta’s recent cold snap, though wind- and solar-power systems were not able to prevent the grid alerts, it was thanks to renewable-energy systems that the grid alert was lifted.
“Nuclear isn’t just slow and expensive, but too inflexible to go up and down with the swings of demand,” says Paul Dorfman, associate fellow with the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex and chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group.
“Variability of wind and solar technology are far more easily integrated into evolving flexible electricity grids, including long-distance interconnection.”
Unlike nuclear power, which is severely constrained in terms of where generating stations can be built — both due to their need to be located close to sources of water and to public resistance to having nuclear plants in their backyards — solar and wind systems actually operate best in a highly decentralized fashion. Whereas solar and wind can be built essentially wherever there’s a chance of its being sunny or windy, in Ontario, nuclear power is effectively limited to being built only where plants already exist.
If Smith is genuinely concerned about intermittency, putting all his eggs in the nuclear basket hardly seems like the common-sense choice.
“Nuclear advocates claim nuclear is still needed because wind and solar are intermittent and need natural gas for backup. However, nuclear itself never matches power demand so it needs backup,” wrote Mark Z. Jacobson, director of Stanford University’s Atmosphere/Energy Program, in recent testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Today batteries are beating natural gas for wind and solar backup needs. Dozens of independent scientific groups have further found that it is possible to match intermittent power demand with clean, renewable supply and storage, without nuclear or fossil fuels, at low cost.”
When asked by a reporter why the province wasn’t spending its money on renewables, Smith said simply that spending it on nuclear was the “plan that made sense.”
He then added that, according to studies, replacing Pickering’s 2,000 megawatt nuclear capacity would require 18,000 megawatts of wind power, plus another 2,000 megawatts of battery storage.
If Ontario needs to replace a 2,000-megawatt nuclear plant, it doesn’t need to build 10 times as much equivalent wind or solar power.
“Two thousand megawatts of nuclear multiplied by its capacity factor of 0.9 and all divided by the capacity factor of wind (0.4) gives 4,500 megawatts of wind needed to provide the same output, not 18,000 megawatts as claimed by the minister,” says Jacobson.
“At roughly $1.35 million per megawatt, the cost of the equivalent wind farm would be approximately $6.075 billion.”
Paul Dorfman thinks Smith is overconfident about a poorly argued case.
“His discussion just doesn’t ‘make sense,’ as he puts it. He doesn't put any numbers on the refit, doesn't give any real info on the problems of refitting an aging plant. And these ‘studies,’ which he says means [replacing nuclear with renewables] would require 10 times more wind, seem deeply problematic.”
“Energy needs to be taken in the round,” Dorfman adds. “The future is renewables in all its forms — evolving storage, demand-side management, energy efficiency, inter-connectors, centralized and distributed grid up-grades. An 11-year refit seems like a huge waste of time and funding.”
Taxpayer money would be better spent on fully renewable energy, and with an estimated 24-month construction period, it would lessen the overall economic burden as well. If there’s a near-term need for reliable, renewable, and inexpensive energy to replace an aging nuclear reactor, spending tens of billions over a decade is hardly the best way to achieve that goal.
Last, but certainly not least, there is the safety and security issue. Some Canadians like to boast that the Nuclear Response Team of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station has won the U.S. National SWAT Championships four times in recent years. It is indeed quite the accomplishment considering how many police forces they compete against. But it’s worth considering as well that, if a solar farm or wind turbine were targeted, they’d break, and the lights would go out. The bombing of a nuclear plant would be a much bigger problem.
Ontario had two serious nuclear incidents at the Chalk River Lab in the 1950s. At least one could be described as a partial meltdown. Pickering’s operator, the provincially owned Ontario Power Generation, attests that necessary safeguards are in place. “Our stations operate inside the strictest of standards and regulatory requirements to ensure our communities are always safe,” it states. “OPG is responsible for developing and maintaining Emergency Plans that would be used in the very unlikely event of a nuclear emergency. We ensure responses to any given number of emergency scenarios are tested on a regular basis.”
Groups such as the Canadian Environmental Law Association, however, have expressed serious concerns. “While it is hoped that a severe nuclear accident will never again happen in Ontario, the reality is that unexpected and extremely damaging severe accidents can occur,” CELA wrote in a press release in response to the Ford government decision. “For that reason, high population areas and operating commercial nuclear plants are incompatible.”
Past disasters from atomic power’s infancy are not brought up to impugn the present-day reputations of Canada’s nuclear workforce: like oil workers or coal miners, the nuclear workforce isn’t the problem. Rather, it’s the politicians who keep subsidizing old technologies and industries — putting opportunity and ideology ahead of basic economics — who are holding us back.
Clarifications
This article generated some questions from readers. As such, it has been updated with additional information.
The paragraph discussing the intermittency of different power systems was clarified to explain that wind speed and cloud cover specifically — not just the presence of wind or cloud — affects the intermittency of renewables. Information about the intermittency of nuclear power, such as the example of the 2022 French nuclear shutdown, and about evolving storage technology was also added.
The same paragraph also addresses the role renewables played in the recent Alberta grid alert. While renewables didn’t prevent the grid alert, it was thanks to renewables that the grid alert ended.
A new quote from Paul Dorfman addresses renewable variability and the difficulties of integrating nuclear into evolving electrical grids.
A new quote from Mark Jacobson explains why Energy Minister Todd Smith’s assertion that 10 times as much renewable energy would be needed to replace the power output of the Pickering plant is dubious.
These additional explanations made several other paragraphs redundant, and they were removed.
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