This is becoming an incredibly dated argument in the face of experience in many other jurisdictions that now have heavily integrated renewable power into their systems. Denmark now gets 88% of its power from renewable sources. Australia has so much solar power it is giving it away to residents free for hours each day. Despite claims from naysayers, Germany is getting 45% of its power from renewable sources and fully committed to reaching 80% in five years. Ireland has phased out coal by using solar and wind instead.
Here in Ontario, the Independent Electricity System Operator has shown that we can meet our electricity needs with solar, wind and storage at a lower cost than relying on new nuclear plants. This would require a large build out of renewable capacity and storage (the IESO only considered batteries for storage, but there are many other options) but would allow Ontario to export power profitably when it has surplus renewable power. Building up to 20 new reactors is going to cost far more and have much higher risks and will hardly be a small undertaking.
Renewable technology is now well proven, involves simple off-the-shelf components and is projected to decline in cost by a further 25-30% in the next ten years. Solar and wind can be deployed in months, not decades like nuclear.
Renewable systems also offer far better resilience because power sources are widely distributed. If a single nuclear reactor goes offline, we are left with a massive hole in our system.
In fact, total electricity demand in Ontario has fallen by 10% since 2005 (as of 2025). Electricity demand has been growing over more recent years (although it dipped in both 2020 and 2023) and it is certainly true that demand will grow as we electrify transportation or building heat.
Ontario needs to think more carefully about how to meet this increased demand in a flexible, timely and low-cost way. The answer is a mix of renewable energy sources (e.g., solar, onshore and offshore wind, waterpower) and storage (batteries, compressed air, thermal, hydro reservoirs). This mix would be at least 50% less costly than nuclear and with costs for renewables and storage still falling rapidly, is likely to become an even better bargain. We also avoid the risk of an overbuilt system dumping power at a loss paid for by Ontario taxpayers and ratepayers.
Efficiency and smart controls can also play a major role in helping us deal with growing demand. Our systems are often built to meet brief spikes in power demand on hot summer days. We can avoid these peaks at a much lower cost by paying people and businesses to shift usage in peak periods and using advanced controls to shift power demand. Steadily increasing efficiency in lighting, appliances, motors and building envelopes can also curb demand growth.
It isn’t. Only Ontario is moving forward with plans for massive deployment of new nuclear. There’s a good reason that most of the interest in new nuclear consists of talk and not action – cost. The most recently completed nuclear projects in North America went massively over budget (or were cancelled due to completely out of control costs). That’s just the usual outcome for big nuclear projects. Every new nuclear project in Ontario has gone over budget and been finished behind schedule (including the Darlington refurbishment, which will be at least $3 billion over budget).
The nuclear industry’s answer to the problem of an uncompetitive cost structure (massive upfront capital costs and long timelines for construction) is to promise Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). Except as expert after expert has pointed out, what the industry has on the drawing board is not small or modular. In most cases, it is old technology repackaged into a slightly smaller size at the expense of much lower energy output per dollar spent and reducing safety systems. Many of the companies touting “new” SMR technology are trying to reboot old ideas (molten salt, breeder reactors) that were discarded long ago as unworkable. In most cases, these companies lack the capital or the expertise to get their projects off the ground in any case, as New Brunswick has discovered at significant public cost.
Meanwhile, to make reactors “modular” we would have to be building thousands every year. That’s just not about to happen with the cost and complexity of nuclear technology. It has already happened with solar, wind and batteries because these components really can be produced at mega factory scale. Nuclear reactors remain hand crafted projects like a custom-made suit and are equally expensive (and hard to fix) because of that.
Nuclear promoters often point to China, one of the few places to consistently build nuclear over the past decade, as evidence that nuclear is rebounding. The truth is that renewable energy is leaving nuclear in the dust, even in China. China installed 200 times more renewable energy capacity in 2024 than nuclear. Renewables produced 60 times more power in China than nuclear in 2024.
The footprint of solar farms that could meet 100% of our electricity needs would be 4/10ths of 1% of Ontario’s total land area.
Of course, not all solar needs to be in large ground-mounted arrays. Adding solar to rooftops and parking lots has numerous advantages, including generating power right where it is needed and not requiring significant new transmission infrastructure. Rooftop and parking lot solar could, for example, meet more than 50% of Toronto’s total electricity needs.
Great Lakes offshore wind power could also meet 100% of Ontario’s electricity needs. The Canadian side of Lake Ontario alone is 10,000 square kilometres (km2). The lakebed footprint of offshore wind turbines that could supply 100% of our electricity needs would be less than 1 km2. Wind over water is stronger and steadier than wind over land, making it possible to deliver more power with fewer turbines offshore. Ontario Power Generation has a number of lakeside sites with transmission infrastructure that could connect to offshore wind farms, including in Port Hope, Lambton and Nanticoke.
Encouraging community ownership of new renewable installations, reducing connection hurdles and bureaucracy, re-introducing a set price program for small business and residential solar installations and making better use of underused spaces like vast asphalt parking lots can lead to quick growth in renewable energy throughout the province.
According to Energy Minister Stephen Lecce’s Feb. 2, 2026 news release, the Darlington Refurbishment project was completed ahead of schedule and under budget and will extend the life of the station’s four nuclear reactors until at least 2055.
Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG’s) application to the Ontario Energy Board for a 72.6% increase in its price of nuclear energy in 2027 tells a different story.
According to OPG, it will have to spend an additional $3.3 billion on the following projects to ensure the safe operation of the Darlington Nuclear Station until 2055:
- Steam Generator Primary Moisture Separators Replacement Projects: $359.2 million;
- Darlington Unit 1 and 2 Generator Stator Rewind Project: $350 million; and
- Darlington Turbine Rotors Replacement Project: $2.589 billion.
This is like undertaking a kitchen reno and discovering halfway through that the power supply is inadequate and the main drain is corroded. Not expected, but what happens when you take apart aging systems and all going to be part of the final bill. Pretending these are somehow “additional” expenses is an exercise in irrelevance – we still have to pay for them and it highlights just how uncertain any estimation of nuclear costs can be.
So the truth is that every single Ontario nuclear project has gone over budget and been completed behind schedule.
Ontario does not have an approved facility for long-term storage of radioactive waste. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO – a nuclear industry group, not a public entity) is seeking approval for a plan to build a Deep Geological Repository (DGR) in northwestern Ontario. This plan is strongly opposed by local communities and First Nations. The NWMO also does not have an approved plan for how to move this deadly waste thousands of kilometres from generating stations to its proposed DGR.
Meanwhile, highly radioactive waste is stored in open pools and commercial grade warehouses at four operating nuclear plants, at the edge of our Great Lakes.
Nearly 50 years ago, Ontario Power Generation (OPG) bet on the wrong technology. It started building a power plant at Wesleyville that would use fuel oil just as the oil crisis in the 1970s spiked fossil fuel prices. OPG had to abandon the project as uneconomic. OPG is now running down the same road again – betting on the wrong technology at the wrong time. We will all pay for this mistake.
As a way to address climate change, nuclear fails the test. With projects taking a decade or more to produce power, nuclear reactors cannot address the need to reduce emissions now. We have let climate change spin out of control. Warming that is leading to a rapid increase in everything from fire and drought to flooding and extreme hit has been rapidly accelerating over the last decade. In other words, climate change is now a runaway train and we can’t wait decades to start reducing emissions. Of course, it is now possible to build renewable systems in as little as a year so, fortunately, we don’t have to wait for nuclear reactors to be ready.
Then there is the problem of cost. Nuclear is one of the most expensive ways to address climate change. The cost per tonne of emission reductions is easily more than double the cost of using renewable energy to achieve the same results. That matters because we need to get the biggest bang for our buck we possibly can in terms of emission reductions to increase the odds of preventing the worst impacts of climate change.
Of course, nuclear reactors are online on average no more than 80% of the time. They need to be shutdown for refueling, maintenance and repairs. During these outages, gas-fired power plants are likely to fill the gap. This is why with numerous reactors offline, gas plant usage in Ontario has soared over the past decade. Gas plants are also expected to fill the gap until new nuclear plants are completed, adding emissions at the worst possible moment for our planet.