The strengthening case for nuclear

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Last week, the Ontario government announced plans to spend many years and billions of dollars refurbishing an old nuclear plant in Pickering, just east of Toronto. Pure folly, said its critics. In fact, the decision makes good, solid sense, both for Ontario and the planet.

Winning the battle to control global warming depends in large part on powering more things with electricity – specifically electricity that isn’t produced by burning fossil fuels. Making that energy shift is a huge task, but Ontario has two big advantages.

The first is access to hydroelectric power. Turbines using the power of cascading water at Niagara Falls have been producing clean energy for well over a century.

The second is nuclear power. Using Canada’s Candu technology, Pickering started running in the 1970s, which makes it the oldest nuclear plant in the country. Today it produces about the same amount of power as the generating stations in Niagara.

Add in the juice from the nearby Darlington plant and from the Bruce plant on Lake Huron and nuclear provides Ontario with more than half of its electrical power. A further quarter comes from hydro and the remainder mainly from natural gas, wind and solar. All told, about nine-tenths of the province’s electricity comes from non-fossil-fuel sources. Ontario managed to shut the last of its coal-fired generating plants a decade ago, helping to limit its greenhouse gas emissions.

So, when it comes to cleaning its electricity grid, Ontario is well ahead of the game. But it will need even more clean electricity in years to come, as more industries electrify and more residents buy electric-powered cars and heat pumps.

Some environmentalists would like the province to get most of that extra power from wind and solar. Ontario’s electricity operator, sensibly, is trying to ramp up generation from those sources.

But Ontario is neither particularly sunny nor windy and those forces don’t produce power around the clock as nuclear does. Hydro power is largely tapped out. There are no more Niagaras to harness.

These are the facts that led the government to its decision to refurbish Pickering, as costly as that will be. To avoid relying much more heavily on natural gas, which would hobble its attempts to meet its climate commitments, Ontario will have to keep its reactors running – even build more of them.

Many countries are seeking to ramp up their nuclear generation as they struggle to achieve carbon neutrality. The war in Ukraine spurred them on, forcing up energy prices and making power by splitting atoms look more attractive.

Meanwhile, the case against nuclear power, never strong, is weakening. Even factoring in big disasters such as Chernobyl in Soviet Ukraine or Fukushima in Japan, nuclear is safe compared with coal, oil, gas or even hydro when measured by the number of deaths per unit of energy produced. Canada’s Candu fleet has operated safely for half a century.

The other problem with nuclear power – how to store radioactive waste safely – is quite manageable. Canada’s solution, under study for two decades and gradually moving ahead, is to bury it in purpose-built caverns deep beneath the earth, sealed in multiple barriers.

The remaining knock against nuclear power is the cost, which is immense. Just gearing up for the work at Pickering (where – full disclosure – my future son-in-law works as a firefighter) will cost $2-billion. The government says it doesn’t know yet what the final bill will be.

Partly because of the eye-popping cost estimates, Ontario’s electricity producer decided back in 2009 not to proceed with refurbishment. Several things changed its mind: a growing economy; new, higher projections of energy demand; the drive for electrification, which includes luring manufacturers to build electric-vehicle battery and battery-component plants in the province.

The decisive factor is the campaign against global warming. The need to decarbonize has become more and more urgent as the years pass. Time is running short. Canadian governments have set themselves ambitious targets for reducing emissions.

This country can’t possibly hope to meet them without nuclear plants like Pickering, a clean, safe, reliable source of electrical power.