The Federal Budget 2023, announced in March, showed strong support for nuclear power.
The budget offers a 15% refundable Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for clean electricity including nuclear and a 30% ITC for clean technology manufacturing (including nuclear energy equipment, and processing or recycling nuclear fuels).
The budget also explicitly backs nuclear power through a range of other initiatives, such as an extension of reduced tax rates, financing from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, cash for the regulatory authority, and half a billion dollars in SMR project investment.
It’s no great mystery. 3500MW Darlington cost the equivalent of $23B in today’s money. OPG just couldn’t afford to replace something like Nanticoke (~4000MW) with reactors at the time.
Point Lepreau cost $3.8B in today’s money, and needed an extensive refurbishment 28 years later. The refurbishment was supposed to take 18 months and cost $1.5B (2010). It ended up taking almost 5 years and cost $2.5B ($3.1B in today’s money). For only 660MW, that’s some expensive power.
Edit: There was supposed to be a Unit 2 at Lepreau. Some of the concrete work was done for a second reactor at the same time as work on the first unit started. After all of the construction delays and overruns, they decided not to go ahead with it. It’s been brought up a number of times since, but the economics kill it.
When the identical reactor at Gentilly was due for refurbishment, Quebec Hydro was “Naw” and decommissioned it.
The sale of AECL to SNC-Lavalin by Harper, and their change to emphasize support and maintenance rather than new reactor sales means that utilities would be looking at reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 or Areva EPR/EPR-2. They’ve got a really bad track record for massive cost overruns.
I’m not arguing that it’s not difficult and expensive. Nuclear power plants are basically megaprojects. But they’re megaprojects that have dividends that last a good half century, and Canada is basically 100% self sufficient when it comes to nuclear operations making it not only up to us if it’s green or not, but energy security is guaranteed.
Of course excluding events like the cascade failure of the entire east or west coast power grids.
The issue is that we’ve had few governments strong enough to actually get shit done this last decade. And of them, the only one squandered that power (IMO) and made the country worse.
