Near the end of 2023, the government published its second nuclear fantasy of the year. The December statement declares that Canada will work with other countries to “advance a global aspirational goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050.”
In a sprinkling of public relations fairy dust, the declaration is labeled “COP28”, although written well before the two-week climate summit in Dubai. The nuclear declaration managed to attract only 25 endorsing countries, in contrast to the official COP28 pledge to triple renewable energy and energy efficiency by 2030, signed by 123 countries and eventually adopted by consensus in the final COP declaration.
The currently operating power generating capacity of all nuclear plants in the world is 365 gigawatts. Tripling that total by 2050, in the next 26 years, will mean reaching close to 1,100 gigawatts. Looking back 26 years, the power capacity of the global nuclear fleet has grown an average of 0.8 gigawatts each year. At that rate, nuclear capacity in 2050 will be a mere 386 gigawatts.
And tripling today’s nuclear capacity would require the industry to overcome the significant setbacks and delays in new reactor construction that have plagued it forever with no solution in sight, while building an additional large number of reactors to replace old ones shut down over the same period.
Earlier last year, the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) published the country’s previous nuclear fantasy document, with scenarios that also projected roughly a tripling of nuclear generation capacity by 2050. Canada’s six nuclear plants currently produce about 13 gigawatts of power; a tripling would bring that to 39 GW. The CER report envisions this new nuclear capacity coming from so-called small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).
Only two public utilities in Canada are proposing to build SMRs: NB Power in New Brunswick, and Ontario Power Generation (OPG). The most authoritative report to date on SMRs, from the U.S. National Academies, found that the designs planned for New Brunswick—a molten salt reactor and a sodium-cooled reactor—are unlikely to reach commercial deployment by 2050.
OPG is promising that its SMR design, a 300-megawatt boiling water reactor, will be the first in the world to be deployed commercially starting in 2030, although the design has not yet been licenced to build in Canada or anywhere else. Assuming that this unit is chosen for widespread deployment in Canada, nearly 90 would need to be built and operating effectively on the grid between 2030 and 2050 to achieve the proposed tripling. Given the known construction time overruns for nuclear power plants, this also is impossible.
The news on the SMR front from around the world has been bleak—especially in the United States, which has been trying to commercialize SMR designs for more than a decade. The flagship SMR design in the U.S., the NuScale light-water reactor, was the first to receive design approval by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However plans to build an array of NuScale reactors were shelved in November when the estimated construction costs ballooned to US$9.3-billion (C$12.8-billion) for 462 megawatts and potential customers fled. Earlier this month, NuScale laid off nearly half of its work force.
Assuming the NuScale construction costs of $27.7 million per megawatt would be an acceptable price range to customers in Canada, that would give the OPG design, also a light-water reactor, a cost of $8.3 billion per unit. If 90 units were built as a way to triple nuclear energy capacity, the total price tag would be $747 billion. That assumes that costs won’t go up during construction, as has been the case with the majority of nuclear projects in Canada and around the world.
So far, federal and provincial taxpayers have been footing the bill for SMR development in Canada, with little private sector investment—meaning the investor scrutiny and cost controls that torpedoed the NuScale project are muted at best. Would Canadian taxpayers be OK with continuing to shell out up to a trillion dollars for a technology with no proven track record of producing reliable, affordable electricity? Particularly when the energy efficiency, solar, and wind technologies explicitly favoured by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the quickest path to emission reductions are already proven, affordable, and ready for prime time?
Last month’s bogus “COP28” nuclear declaration is posted on the Natural Resources Canada website. Like its counterpart in the United States, the Department of Energy, NRCan is the department responsible for promoting the interests of the nuclear industry. In both the United States and Canada, that industry has been failing for decades, and one of its strategies for securing government support has been to appeal to geopolitical interests. In recent years, that appeal has usually involved pointing out how Western countries are falling behind Russia, the largest exporter of nuclear power plants, and China, which has built more nuclear plants than any other country over the past decade.
The U.S. government has responded by using its diplomatic clout to promote nuclear energy, especially small modular reactors. In Washington, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson delivered Canada’s statement on nuclear energy that linked Canadian exports of uranium and nuclear technology to energy security in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This geopolitical context explains why Russia and China were conspicuously missing from the list of signatories to the declaration to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050.
The nuclear industry’s other argument to stay alive is the bogus claim that it can help solve climate change. But as veteran energy modeller and visionary Amory Lovins pointed out: “To protect the climate, we must abate the most carbon at the least cost—and in the least time—so we must pay attention to carbon, cost, and time, not to carbon alone.” The climate crisis is urgent. The world has neither the financial resources nor the luxury of time to expand nuclear power.
Meanwhile, the website of Environment and Climate Change Canada, the department truly responsible for the country’s international climate commitments, has a genuine COP28 statement that does not mention nuclear. Instead, it highlights “groundbreaking goals to triple renewable energy, double energy efficiency, and, for the first time ever… a historic consensus to move away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”
Tripling nuclear energy by 2050 is a nuclear industry fantasy and complete make-believe. Tripling renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency by 2030 is sensible and doable, as long as the requisite political will is present. It is past time to get real about the energy generation technologies we need to be supporting.
Susan O’Donnell is Adjunct Research Professor and leader of the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. M.V. Ramana is Professor and Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the University of British Columbia.
