I want to be direct about where I actually stand: I’m not opposed to nuclear power at Wesleyville, and I think a responsibly scaled project could be a real opportunity for this community. What I don’t support is turning the site into what the Ontario Government itself has floated as a theoretical maximum, a 10,000 megawatt facility that would rank among the largest nuclear station in the world. That’s a different thing entirely from a phased, reasonably sized expansion, and I think treating the two as the same thing does residents a disservice.
The cost history is exactly why scale matters here. Darlington’s refurbishment came in near $21 billion, Pickering’s near $27 billion, both real, both already happening at existing, moderate-scale stations. Vogtle in Georgia, the closest comparison to a genuinely massive build, went from a $14 billion budget to nearly $37 billion actual, seven years late. The bigger the project, the bigger the risk of exactly that kind of overrun, and nobody, including OPG, can put a real number on the biggest version of Wesleyville today because it hasn’t been designed.
So my position isn’t for or against nuclear in the abstract, it’s that the scale the Ontario Government has floated is too large, too risky, and too untested, and any real project should be capped well below that, with real cost transparency and real host-community protections built in from the start.
