It’s official: the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, on the shores of Lake Ontario in Durham Region, just east of the Rouge River, will continue to hum along producing thousands of megawatts of electricity for decades to come. The Pickering B four reactors, which were initially commissioned in the 1980s and are rated to produce 500 or so megawatts each, will be refurbished in much the same way that the reactors at Darlington and Bruce were designated for refurbishment under the previous Liberal government.
Formally speaking, it’s not a done deal: the government has simply approved $2 billion for advance work that needs to be done before a final decision can be made. The entire project could cost $10 billion, according to Canadians For Nuclear Energy, one of several groups that’s advocated for preserving the power plant as an operating generator. But, in the current context, it’s difficult to imagine this government — or one of its successors — reversing course.
For starters, there’s the demand: Ontario’s energy regulators are warning about a potential electricity shortage in coming years as economic trends see more manufacturing investment in the province and as we shift away from fossil fuels for things like transportation (EVs instead of traditional cars) and home heating (heat pumps instead of furnaces). There’s no question that the 2,000 megawatts from Pickering will find buyers: the Independent Electricity System Operator is already projecting much larger shortfalls in the province’s generation capacity — 4,000 megawatts by summer 2035, even in its more optimistic planning scenario.
Then there’s the supply: while provincial policymakers, like parents, claim to love all their industrial children equally, it would be silly to deny that the CANDU reactors have a special place in the hearts of Ontario leaders. A Canadian-made nuclear reactor (and a supply chain that involves thousands of Ontario workers) will always have a chorus of boosters at Queen’s Park. Indeed, that’s one reason it was so surprising when CANDU’s owner didn’t make the cut for Ontario’s small-modular-reactor program. No need to shed any tears for SNC-Lavalin, though: Tuesday’s announcement — and the years of work to come on the already-announced refurbishments — means it’s already booked income into the 2030s.
It's true that objective need and subjective fondness are no guarantee of anything in politics. But when it comes to the PCs’ rivals on the Ontario political scene, it’s not obvious where any serious effort to reverse the Pickering decision would come from. The official Opposition’s initial reaction to the day’s announcement involved skepticism about the government’s due diligence and competence — not about nuclear power itself.
“I think it’s really important we get this right,” NDP leader Marit Stiles said during a Queen’s Park press conference prior to the announcement. “We know that Ontario has the best energy workers in the world, but there are lots of questions. Frankly, I don’t trust this government to get it right.”
The Liberals struck a similar note, highlighting the government's record on electricity planning overall but not singling out nuclear power for criticism.
“Since coming to power, the Ford Conservatives have been asleep at the switch when it comes to planning ahead for the electricity system we all depend on,” Liberal energy critic Ted Hsu said in an emailed statement. “Experts warned us that record-breaking heat waves, the adoption of electric vehicles, building new homes, and tacking climate change would greatly pump up electricity demand. This lack of foresight will harm both businesses and ratepayers in the long run.”
So thus far, Green leader Mike Schreiner is the sole dissenting voice. “Greens understand that nuclear power from the Bruce and Darlington nuclear stations will be part of Ontario’s electricity mix for decades,” Schreiner said in a release. “But Pickering is one of the oldest, worst-performing nuclear plants in North America. It makes no sense for the government to pour billions into keeping it operational when lower-cost, cleaner solutions are available.”
There are still substantial questions that will need to be answered if the refurbishment of Pickering’s B reactors goes ahead. Eventually, we’ll need to decide what to do with the spent nuclear fuel: the current plan for a deep geological repository to store Canada’s accumulated nuclear waste is designed to accommodate the spent fuel from the existing reactors and doesn’t account for the decades of additional fuel used to supply refurbished ones. The federal agency that’s supposed to build the long-term storage deep underground… somewhere…is evaluating two sites, one in northern Ontario and one in the Bruce Peninsula, and is supposed to announce its decision sometime in the coming year.
That substantial unanswered question aside, perhaps the simplest reason the government is moving ahead with refurbishing Pickering — and the thing that makes it so unlikely a future government would reverse the move — is that this is the path of least resistance for getting new electricity generation on the grid in Ontario. Building a new nuclear plant anywhere in this province would be politically difficult and could easily consume a government. That’s largely why all the nuclear investments announced by this government and its predecessor involve places nuclear plants already exist. Pickering is already there and so are the transmission lines that feed power to the rest of the provincial grid.
The bad news for the government is that hard questions usually can’t be completely solved with easy answers. Pickering’s 2,000 megawatts are a nice start, but it’ll take more work in the coming decades to keep the lights on, particularly if Ontario consumers take to electric vehicles enthusiastically enough to make the government’s EV subsidies worth the investment. When the low-hanging fruit have all been picked, we’ll see how much farther we need to go — and what that will cost.
This article has been updated with comment from Liberal energy critic Ted Hsu.
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