The Decibel - Canada’s push for nuclear power

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

The federal government wants Canada to get back into nuclear energy, pushing to increase nuclear power use and to build and export more Canadian-made nuclear reactors. For the first time in over three decades, a large nuclear reactor is being built in Canada. But The Globe’s investigative reporter and data journalist Matt McClearn says there’s a reason these projects fell out of favour. There are famous, very deadly examples of nuclear accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, and these projects can be incredibly costly and time-consuming to construct. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nuclear power is having a bit of a moment. After years of governments around the world avoiding the technology, there's new interests in it, including here in Canada. Ladies and gentlemen, built over 70 years, Canada's nuclear energy advantage is one of our greatest achievements. And one of our greatest cards to play in the volatile world in which Canada finds itself. Federal energy minister, Tim Hodgson, unveiled a strategy on Monday, to push the country towards using more nuclear power

and to build and export more Canadian-made reactors. Ontario is in the midst of constructing a large nuclear reactor for the first time in over 30 years. But these projects are notorious for going over time and over budget. So today I'm joined by Matthew McLearn. He's an investigative reporter and data journalist with the Globe who writes about energy and natural resources. He'll tell us about the push for nuclear energy and why these projects are so hard to get off the ground.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decible from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Matt, great to have you in studio. It's great to be here. So the federal government is pushing for Canada to become a hub of nuclear power generation. Can you give me a lay of the land before we talk about that? Like how much nuclear power is being used across the country? Right now, on the aggregate, there isn't much. But in Ontario, nuclear is probably the most important source of power on the grid here.

And this happens to be the country's most populous province. Currently, about half the electricity that Ontarians use comes from nuclear power plants. We have three major plants here in Ontario, the Darlington plant, the Pickering plant, and the Bruce plant. All these were built decades ago. There is also one reactor in New Brunswick, which was built. kind of came online in the 1980s. And around that time, Quebec also had a reactor built. But that one has been out of commission for, I think, 15 years now at least.

So Quebec now has no nuclear. So it's just those two provinces, Ontario and New Brunswick. How does Canada compare to other countries in using nuclear power? So it's a really mixed bag. There are many countries in the world. But I could point to our story is quite similar to many. developed countries, so-called Western countries, Great Britain, France, the U.S., all built quite a few nuclear power plants in the sort of 60s, 70s into the 80s, perhaps, and had vigorous industries at that time. Japan had a lot of nuclear power.

And of course, there are some countries that have absolutely none, right? That's most countries in the world have none. But Canada uniquely decided to go with a heavy water technology. We call it the can do. We developed our own national reactor, basically, that played to Canada's strengths in the 50s and 60s. And was sort of a unique design. And that's what we built here. and we also exported it to a number of countries, you know, Argentina, for example, and Korea and China.

But a lot of that's in the rearview mirror now. You know, we haven't built a can do. The last can do in Canada was finished in 1993 here in Ontario. And just like many of these other countries, you know, there hasn't really been a lot of construction in Western countries of nuclear projects in the last 20, 25 years or more. But that's shifting now, right? We're starting to hear more about nuclear energy or this is becoming more attractive for governments, including here in Canada. What is the appeal for governments? Like, what's the draw of nuclear power?

Well, one of the main benefits of nuclear power is that it is a low-carbon source of electricity. It doesn't have many greenhouse gas emissions associated with any of it. I will say, though, that I think that particular asset right now is on the wane because there are a lot of governments. who they wouldn't necessarily explicitly say this, some of them, but they are devaluing low carbon as an objective. Some of them are very happy to build natural gas or, you know, emitting resources. But that is a main benefit of nuclear in the 21st century is that, you know, if you do care about climate change, it's seen as a potential solution for that. Another thing that to be said about nuclear is that it has what's called a high capacity factor. Now, this is industry jargon, so I'll unpack it for you.

Okay, maybe an example is the best way to do it. So if you have a wind turbine that's rated for 300 megawatts or, I mean, a wind farm that is, one with dozens of turbines, it's almost never going to generate that because the wind's not blowing all the time, right? Right. So, you know, capacity factor for a wind farm might be, say, 30%, right? It generates 30% of the theoretical maximum. It could if conditions were ideal. And with hydroelectric, again, you know, rivers are seasonal, right? They're not always flowing 100%, right?

There's the spring freshet, and then, you know, at other times of the year, the river's running lower and there's less water. And so you might, for the sake of argument, you might have like 60% capacity factor for a hydroelectric project. The most reliable nuclear reactors have a capacity factor around 90%. Now... Okay, that's a difference there. Yes. you also can schedule when you're going to take it offline, right, for a convenient time for inspections and maintenance. So, you know, maybe when you know a time of year that you know demand is going to be lower.

And that's valuable to grid operators. So you might be prepared to pay a premium for nuclear for that. And the question becomes, how much more are you prepared to pay? Because nuclear has very, very high upfront capital costs. And I just want to point out, though, that there's also a lot of hype in this industry. So you hear a lot of talk about nuclear and it might give you the impression that there's a lot going on. But to understand what's really going on, you have to clear all the smoke and look at what's actually being built. In North America right now, there is one reactor being built here in Ontario.

That's actually happening. That's real. the province has committed billions of dollars to build it. And that's actually quite different than the situation in most Western countries. There's a lot of talk about nuclear, but there are very few plants being built. So there's interest and a lot of it comes down to are governments willing to open up their purse strings to pay for these things? Okay, well, let's talk about that because there is one government that is talking about this. This is the federal government.

They unveiled the strategy on Monday. What's in the strategy that was released this week? The government is really signaling that it is very interested in promoting nuclear power. Previous governments have been interested in this as well, so this is nothing new. In the Trudeau years, there was this great push for small modular reactors, which are typically below 300 megawatts in capacity, and often pieces of them can be made in factories. And this is supposed to make them cheaper and easier to produce. This government is leaning towards larger reactors, which they want to support. That basically means reactors in sort of the 1,000 megawatt range or possibly above.

They are making indications that perhaps, you know, they're prepared to use whatever funding mechanisms that are at their disposal to promote nuclear. I don't know if that's much of a difference, though, from the past. Whenever we've exported reactors abroad to other countries, typically the federal government has generously financed those sales. And they're talking about doing it again if we can get more export deals. So I don't see a ton new in this. And there's certainly to this point, there's no additional money that they've committed. They haven't said, oh, we're creating the Canadian nuclear fund that's going to help fund these projects. They're just signaling that they are supportive.

Maybe this is in tone, though, you could say that there's perhaps even more enthusiasm for nuclear from this government than we've seen in decades passing. Yeah. And just to get a sense of like what this enthusiasm looks like. So they're looking to expand large-scale reactors from 17 to 27. Two should be under construction by 2035, which seems like, you know, that's pretty soon. another five plan for development by 2040, just to get a sense of what they're looking to do here. You mentioned Kandu earlier. This is the Canadian-made reactors, and this was a big focus of the strategy that was unveiled on Monday.

Quite so. What is the government hoping Kandu will accomplish here? Well, the Kandu is regarded in many cases as kind of an old technology, a 20th century technology. And the government and also Aiken's Realis, which is sort of the steward of that technology now, it bought the reactor division from the old Crown Corporation that used to develop these things. They are working on an updated version of a 1980s reactor that they built at Darlington. The thinking is that they need to build these here in Canada first to show that it's still a viable technology, that it's still a desirable one.

And then hopefully other countries would be interested in buying it as well. And we can put workers here in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada to work building these things abroad. It also kind of fits into our push for sovereignty, right? Like there's like, you know, we're creating something in Canada with Canadian, I'm assuming Canadian products. And so this is kind of an all Canada main thing. Yeah, that's right. In Ontario, there's talk about making two new large. nuclear power plants. If they were built, these would be among the largest plants in the world.

So one of them is called Wesleyville. It would be in Port Hope along Lake Ontario. And the other is called Bruce C, which would be four more reactors at the existing Bruce plant, which already is one of the largest plants by any measure in the world. And it already has eight reactors there, all can do's. So Aiken's Reales wants to sell reactors to Ontario Power Generation for Wesleyville and Bruce Power for Bruce C. I think the federal government would like to put the can do in a position where it can compete in that field. Okay. So we talked a little bit about the strategy and how you said there's nothing really new in it. And in fact, there's no new money in it either. So what is the point of the strategy then if there is, I guess, nothing new there?

Well, I guess that's where we have to wait and see. We have to wait and see whether the government, what the government is prepared to do after this rhetoric that they've just put out, I think. Are they going to commit more funding to nuclear projects? Are they going to spend more money towards the development of new Kandu reactors? That's an open question. They also talk about the regulation of these projects. So, as you know, the federal government, the Carney government, is very interested in speeding up approvals for projects and doing things faster, basically, big things faster.

And nuclear power plants fit into that rubric. They want to see nuclear plants built more quickly. And so they have said that they want to streamline processes for nuclear power plants. We have no idea what that looks like. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is responsible for approving nuclear power plants and ensuring that they're built to modern safety standards. It's not clear what the government's prepared to do here in Canada for that. And of course, you have to be really careful when you start mucking about with regulatory processes

that you don't make things less safe because if there's ever an accident, it could set back the industry far more than they would gain by, you know, getting a quicker approval. We'll be right back. I feel like we haven't talked about the elephant in the room here with nuclear energy. which is when something does go wrong with plants like these, it's very serious, right? People might be thinking about nuclear accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. How do those types of accidents impact the decisions governments were making around investing in nuclear power?

I think it had a very significant impact. A good example would be the Fukushima disaster because immediately after that, Germany essentially decided to, which had been a nation that generated power. using nuclear to get off nuclear. These events can have wide-ranging impacts and long-lasting impacts. There's a saying in the industry that a nuclear disaster anywhere is a nuclear disaster everywhere. And I think history has shown that. To keep things in perspective, there are more than 400 reactors operating in the world

today. And there's another, I think it's about 250, that. had operated at some point and then have since shut down. But very few reactors have meltdowns or other serious accidents that capture the public consciousness. But when they do, it can set back the industry by a decade. And it impacts such a wide amount of people. That's right. Yeah. It really doesn't matter where it happens even. You know, Japan's at the other side of the world from Canada and the shockwaves from that accident were felt here. The safety profile of nuclear is just fundamentally different than almost any other technology. I mean, you could,

you might look at hydroelectric and say, okay, there's always the possibility that dam will burst and, you know, you might have loss of life downstream from flooding. Those are pretty serious. But even then, they pale in comparison to what we've seen from, you know, the fallout from the the Chernobyl incidents or Fukushima. Right. And as you said, that could set back the industry quite a bit. Another thing that is at issue here for nuclear power is that projects are very hard to finish on time and on budget.

Can you talk about that? Yes. This is one of the reasons why nuclear fell out of favor in Western countries, beginning in, say, the 1980s, certainly by the 1990s. There have just been this long history of. of project after project coming in well over budget, taking far longer than anyone expected. And this is one of the main challenges that the industry has to overcome if it really wants to start building again, is they have to gain people's confidence, particularly politicians and utilities,

that they're not going to have these huge cost overruns. Why does that happen? Well, a lot of it's not actually particular to nuclear. Nuclear has features in common with other things that also have a tendency to go over budget and over time. I might point to major rail projects. You can probably think of some rail projects. Subway lines. Yes.

LRTs. Yes, these all come to mind. Quite so, right? And what about hydroelectric projects in the power sector, right? You know, in Canada, we've had, you know, the semi-recent examples of Muscat Falls in Newfoundland or Site C and BC. Again, these had many of the same characteristics. So what are those characteristics? Well, these are bespoke projects.

When you're designing a nuclear power plant, it's probably not identical to any other plant in the world. You have your own individual requirements. You have your own individual site. Can you explain a little bit more about that? Because you mentioned earlier that there are some of these products that are reactors that are being made that are kind of modular, for example, right? That they're supposed to be made in a factory and that that makes it go faster. That's the aim. What is it, why is it bespoke every time you go and make a new facility or new project?

Well, one of the thing is that you just receive so few orders, right? There have been so few nuclear reactors built in North America and also Europe in the last 20, 30 years that every time you decide to build one, you're almost starting from scratch. The workforce that you assemble has never built one of these things before, right? Right. And sometimes it's a first of a kind very often. Like you're working off plans that have never been built before. And there's oh so many reasons why these things go awry. It would help to maybe contrast this with the way other projects go. Wind power, for example, has come way down in price over the past 20, 30 years.

Whereas nuclear has continued to get more expensive. How did they achieve that? Well, if you think about a wind farm, you've got dozens and dozens of turbines which are identical. Say even a neophyte developer, you know, the first turbine that they put up, they might botch it. You know, they might take far longer than they should to do it. But by the time they've done 10 of these things, they're getting pretty good at it. That's what the nuclear industry. It's called learning by doing.

And the nuclear industry has really struggled to benefit from this. Because there are so few projects that are happening. That's right. And it's sort of a, you know, it feeds on itself that cycle because if you don't get to build a lot, you don't learn a lot. Your costs are too high, which means you don't get to build a lot. Yeah. Can you give me an example of a project that went over time and over budget? Like how long was it supposed to take?

How much was it supposed to cost? And what actually happened in the end? Okay. So a good example of how nuclear projects go would be the what's called the Vogel plant in Georgia. This was a plant that was an existing nuclear facility and they wanted to build two new reactors there. And these were AP 1000, which is an American design reactor from Westinghouse. And Westinghouse had promised that the AP 1000 could be built, say, in about three years, 36 months. And so that was the hope.

And this project was supposed to cost about $14 billion, if I remember correctly. And it ended up coming in years late and many billions of dollars over budget. I think the final budget, as I've seen it reported, is around $37 billion. And the thing to keep in mind that that kind of outcome is pretty common in the nuclear industry. These are how a lot of these projects go. And they're bad advertisements for the nuclear industry. so the nuclear industry has long sought to do better, and it's just really struggled to do so. Yeah.

Okay, let's talk about this project in Ontario happening right now, because you mentioned there's this construction happening. Can you tell me more about it? Like, what are they building and how is that project going so far? This is a very important one. It's known as the Darlington new nuclear project, and they're building a 300-migawatt reactor at the existing Darlington facility. So it's a small modular reactor. And this is the only reactor that's under construction right now anywhere in North America. Importantly, this reactor would need enriched uranium fuel.

It's a very expensive process. And we cannot do this in Canada. So we are going to have to rely on foreign entities in the U.S., perhaps, which is getting up more uncomfortable and also in France, to fuel this reactor. It's only one reactor, though, right now. But the plan is to build four of these at Darlington. This is a first of a kind reactor. It's never been built before. And OPG has a pretty aggressive timeline.

They want to finish it off by the end of 2029 and then connect it to the grid by 2030. This is something that people around the world are going to be watching. A lot of people are watching what happens in Ontario. If it goes well, they might be encouraged by that and place their own orders. But if this is botched, like what happened. and Georgia, they could have a really hard time attracting order. So this is a project of international importance. Okay.

So basically they're supposed to be done pretty soon here. We talked about how projects like these are delayed usually. So how feasible is it to finish a project like that in four and a half years or so? We're going to find out. If you compare the timeline that they have to builds in other Western countries, it is very aggressive. The French have tried to build some of their reactors. They have taken a very long time to build. If anyone does this right, it's the Chinese.

China is the world's leading builder of reactors right now. In the past 20, 25 years, they've really emerged in that role. They build a lot of nuclear reactors. And some of them they've been able to do in a five-year time frame. But like I say, they have a lot of experience doing it. Here in Canada, we're going from a standing start. We have not built anything since the 80s and early 90s. So this is a major undertaking.

Yeah. So from what I understand that, if this gets finished in this timeline, this aggressive timeline that they're suggesting, it could make it the fastest global nuclear project completed in decades. So this is something that is a lofty goal. But what does that tell you about the other time? line objectives in the government strategy here because they are looking at completing and getting more things up and off the ground. So what does that tell you?

Well, we have to remind ourselves, first of all, the federal government does not have a say in a lot of these things. They are not building nuclear power plants. The provinces do that. And they don't actually get to select the technology. If the government wants to influence that, they have certain levers they can pull in order to steer people to build nuclear and to build certain technologies. If the government really wants people to build Kandu's, they could offer more financing to that, perhaps,

than to competing technologies, assuming that wouldn't contravene any of their trade or other agreements they have with other countries. But if the provinces and provincial utilities don't want to do that, it's not going to happen. And they can also set targets for exporting Kandu reactors or other reactors abroad. But again, foreign customers, have to put up, be willing to take the risks from their end. The federal government can sweeten the pot by export financing, you know, securing taxpayers' dollars and shoveling it into foreign countries. They'll build our stuff.

Again, that doesn't guarantee you the sale. And other countries make those sort of incentives as well. So I think you just need to accept that these are aspirations that the federal government has. And it certainly does have some levers that can pull to make these things happen. but it is by no means guaranteed. And just because they want to build 10 reactors or whatever number they want to come up with

doesn't mean it will happen. Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show and explaining all this. Appreciate it. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. That was Matthew McLearn, an investigative reporter and data journalist with the globe. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland.

Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.