RC113 JulyAugust 2024 - Magazine - Page 10
ENERGY
POWER PLAY
Three provinces are looking at nuclear energy
to help achieve net-zero by Mark Douglas Wessel
S THE WORLD was reminded by the Oscar winning
movie Oppenheimer, nuclear power was 昀椀rst harnessed to produce atomic weapons toward the end
of the Second World War. Energy that was tapped
into for yet another military application a decade
later, when in 1955 the USS Nautilus—the world’s
昀椀rst nuclear-powered submarine was launched.
While these technological breakthroughs dominated the
news of the day, when the Shippingport Atomic Power
Station—the 昀椀rst commercial electric-generating station
powered by nuclear energy—came online in 1958 as part
of President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program,
the story garnished barely a whisper. The New York Times
buried the story on page 28 (half of which was devoted
to a car ad), with the opaque headline “Power Reactor
Started in Test.”
Of course, since those early days of relative anonymity,
nuclear energy has received all kinds of good, bad, and
sometimes ugly coverage. Collectively, the Three Mile
meltdown in 1979, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and
most recently, the Fukushima accident in 2011 have literally fuelled safety concerns over nuclear power as an energy
source for decades.
And yet despite these setbacks and continued pushback
from those in favour of other clean or green energy sources such as wind and solar, some industry analysts believe
that nuclear power is about to experience a renaissance.
Interest no more readily apparent than here in Canada,
where arguably the biggest driver of this country’s energy
transition away from fossil fuels has been its commitment
to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. A commitment
tied to rising concerns over climate change, which in this
country alone contributed to a record number of 昀椀res last
year (over 6,500). Fires that chewed through 45.7 million
acres of forest and produced some of the worst air quality
in the world.
A document prepared last year by the Canada Energy
Regulator (CER) entitled “Canada’s Energy Future 2023”
postulates that to achieve the country’s stated goal of
getting to net-zero “the types of energy that Canadians
use needs to change dramatically, including using a lot
A
Mark Douglas Wessel
Mark Douglas Wessel
is an urban journalist
and communications
consultant. He writes
a regular column
called Green Living for
Postmedia.
10
RENEW CANADA – JULY/AUGUST 2024
more electricity.” The paper projects
that by 2050, 99 per cent of our
electricity will come from a mix of
wind, hydro, natural gas with CCS
(carbon capture storage), bioenergy with carbon capture, storage,
solar… and nuclear power.
If there is one province positioned to play the nuclear card in
anticipation of the growing electri昀椀cation of this country’s economy, it’s Ontario where most of
the country’s reactors are located,
producing 13,144 MW of electricity
or the equivalent of 34 per cent of
the province’s needs. And as Todd
Smith, Ontario’s Minister of Energy
shared with Renew Canada in a
recent interview, those nuclear numbers are expected to
dramatically grow in the coming years.
“The various announcements that were included in
Powering Ontario’s Growth are being acted upon now,”
says Smith, including “moving forward on the refurbishment of Pickering, major component replacements out of
Bruce… and major refurbishments at Darlington.”
On its website, Bruce Power describes these steps as a
“Life Extension Plan” that involves the overhaul of all the
units at the 6,232 MW generating station. A move they
predict “will secure operation until 2064.”
Beyond extending the life of the station, Pat Dalzell,
Bruce Power’s head of corporate a昀昀airs, says that because
of the refurbishments, “we expect more than 7,000 MW of
(additional) output coming out of the site,” by pioneering
a host of new initiatives to get more power out of the reactors. “So, it will be like adding an additional 700 MW…
enough to power three-quarter of a million homes.”
In addition to refurbishing Bruce A and B (with four
reactors at each site for a total of eight), Dalzell notes that
as part of powering Ontario’s growth plan, regulatory and
predevelopment work is being done on “what we call the
Bruce C project… which is an impact assessment to create
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