Canada’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources John Wilkinson has announced C$50 million in federal funding to expand the Bruce Power nuclear facility in Ontario, where the provincial government is “betting big” on nuclear energy.
The expansion will be the country’s first new large-scale nuclear plant construction in 30 years and will be funded through the Clean Electricity Pre-development Program, a Natural Resources Canada fund to support preparatory work on large clean electricity projects. The project will expand the existing Bruce Power plant, nearly doubling its capacity by adding 4,800 megawatts of output, or enough to power 4.8 million average Ontario homes, reports CBC News.
Wilkinson was joined for the February 29 announcement by Ontario Energy Minister Todd Smith. A CBC News source said the project is a “major priority” for Ontario, and that Smith and Wilkinson have been working closely on “shared objectives” to expand the electricity grid—including by boosting nuclear power generation.
But Ontario’s push for more nuclear power could be a costly “folly” that won’t benefit residents and will fail to deliver carbon cuts, wrote Mark Winfield, professor of environmental and urban change at York University, in an op-ed for the Globe and Mail.
The Bruce Power expansion is one of several plans to expand nuclear power in Ontario, alongside other projects at the OPG Darlington and Pickering B facilities.
“The total costs of these plans are unknown at this point, but an overall estimate in excess of $100 billion ($13-billion Darlington refurbishment; $25-billion Bruce refurbishment; $15-billion Pickering B refurbishment; $50-billion for Bruce new build; Darlington new build $10-billion or more) would not be unrealistic,” Winfield said. Even that number could be exceeded by project delays and unforeseen costs, he added. [Winfield is a member of the community sounding board for The Energy Mix’s Heat & Power digest.]
Ontario’s government is pushing for more nuclear energy to meet the expected dramatic growth in electricity demand over the coming decades, as well as the widespread electrification of transportation, home heating, and other sectors. But Winfield said the province’s population and economy have been growing for the past two decades while electricity demand remained flat, and no plans have actually come forward for the electrification of transportation or space heating.
In fact, he said, the province is currently proposing legislation to facilitate the expansion of natural gas service to new housing developments—which could counter the move to electrification—and is marginalizing “lower-cost, lower-risk, faster, and more flexible means of facilitating electrification and decarbonization than centralized systems [like nuclear power] can deliver.”
“While nuclear energy may offer a low-carbon energy source, it fails in virtually every other dimension of sustainability: costs; the production of high-volume, toxic, and radioactive waste streams that require management on timescales of hundreds, if not thousands, of millennia; and security, catastrophic accident and weapons proliferation risks that simply do not exist in relation to other energy technologies,” Winfield wrote.
