The Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Bowmanville, Ontario will be the site of Canada’s first small modular reactor (SMR) project. Photo courtesy of Ontario Power Generation.

The past week was punctuated by a series of major announcements from Ottawa that appear to commit Canada to an overwhelmingly nuclear power-based pathway for its electricity future. The federal government tabled a Nuclear Energy Strategy for Canada, committing, among other things, to 10 new large reactor projects. It also announced its intention to designate a high-level nuclear waste repository as a “project of national interest” (PONI) for accelerated approvals under the provisions of Bill C-5, the Building Canada Act. Ontario, for its part, joined the federal government in financing a $700 million investment by the Williams Treaties First Nations in a small modular reactor (SMR) project at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington Nuclear Generating Station.

Although presented as a definitive pathway toward making Canada an “energy superpower,” the announcements raise at least as many technical, economic, security, and environmental questions as they claim to answer. The key areas of concern include the following.

Technical and economic viability

At its core, the federal plan proposes to pursue the construction of up to 10 new large-scale reactors in Canada, with two under construction by 2035, and five more planned or under development by 2040—including one deployment “outside of Ontario.”

Questions around this strategy arise immediately. The plan identifies no specific locations for these projects, nor reactor technologies that are to be employed. Indeed, it makes clear that even under the most optimistic scenarios no modern cost-competitive Canadian reactor design (likely the 1,000 MW CANDU MONARK derivative of earlier CANDU designs) will be available before the end of the decade.

Among other things, this implies the need for Canada’s nuclear strategy to rely on non-Canadian reactor designs. Despite being aggressively promoted to potential international customers, the MONARK design remains incomplete. The situation has already led the proponent of a project in Alberta to switch their proposal to favour the AP1000 design by Westinghouse Electric, which is based in the United States.

The 300 MW SMR currently under construction at Darlington—which is the lone example of an SMR currently under construction in the OECD—is the US- and Japanese-designed GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300. Although the federal plan references currently non-existent “micro reactors,” it is remarkably silent on the future role of SMRs, the previous centrepiece of federal and provincial nuclear strategies. This could be an acknowledgement of the ongoing concerns over the economic and technical viability of the technology.

The larger US-designed Westinghouse........

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