Ford confirms Pickering plant to stay open
Ontario will keep the elderly nuclear plant in Pickering running until 2024, premier-designate Doug Ford repeated Thursday, for weird and unconservative reasons.
“I believe in made-in-Ontario electricity and madein-Ontario jobs,” Ford said at the plant.
There is nothing special about made-in-Ontario electricity. The Pickering plant’s energy doesn’t make your lights shine plaid or give off a faint mapley-piney aroma.
More importantly, loving Ontario’s electricity system because it’s full of good jobs is one way governments spent decades messing it up.
The Pickering plant is Ontario’s oldest nuclear power station, and everyone agrees it’s in its last few years. The provincial government planned to close it in 2020, but decided in 2016 to delay that for four years while the newer nuclear plants at Darlington and on the Bruce Peninsula get mid-life overhauls.
Those three facilities generate about 60 per cent of Ontario’s electricity. Keeping Pickering online while reactors at the other two sites are down will save us $600 million in costs to replace it with gas-fired generators and millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
The really expensive part of nuclear energy is in building the reactors and refitting them, not running them day to day, so if we’ve got functional reactors we can keep using we might as well do it.
Doug Ford promised this during the election campaign when the New Democrats were surging. The plant was understandably a big deal in Pickering, where star candidate Peter Bethlenfalvy ultimately won.
Ford trooped to Pickering on Thursday to emphasize how strongly he feels about keeping the promise, with every single paragraph in an accompanying news release talking about jobs.
Ontario developed a dogged devotion to nuclear energy out of economic nationalism. We built nuclear plants when hardly anyone else in Canada did. New Brunswick has one small nuclear plant; Quebec built one and shut it down when it got old. Other provinces have toyed with plans but always decided they weren’t worth the money or the risk.
Which is one reason Ontario Hydro ended its days $38 billion in debt. The overruns in building nuclear plants here are legendary: Darlington’s price was ballparked at $3.9 billion in the 1970s and had climbed to $14.4 billion by 1993.
Favouring nuclear power because it creates jobs makes no more sense than favouring wind power because it creates jobs, which was the genesis of the Liberals’ Green Energy Act. The Progressive Conservatives have done well reminding us how that turned out.
The public electricity system should aim to give us reliable power as inexpensively as possible without compromising on reasonable pollution or safety standards. Asking it to be more than that has never turned out well and it won’t under the Tories either.