February 2, 2024

The recent announcement to refurbish the Pickering Nuclear Generation Station in Ontario has restarted another round of discussions on how society should generate electricity for all our needs and wants.

The issues raised around nuclear are numerous:

• safety
• supply chain security and non-proliferation
• building complexity and costs
• time to completion
• storage of waste
• technology changes

There are also several issues that are not raised in polite company when talking about the economics of nuclear power: most nuclear power stations are publicly owned if not also publicly operated.

Nuclear power (like the military) is one of the massive public projects that fully exposes the stupid notion that the public sector cannot do production well. Public utilities do even complex production very well. And, there is an entire planned supply chain around these facilities that show even under capitalism, the state can still do this kind of thing.

However, the other side of the energy generation program also expose how poorly we have decided to do that production. Not because it is nuclear, but because we are still burning fossil fuels when alternative exist.

Planning for energy generation and use has not been a society-level conversation for at least a few decades. In fact, new power stations are rarely built in the West as industrial development was shifted to less energy intensive processes, offloaded energy-intensive processes to the developing world, efficiency became the goal for technology, and an increasing reliance on fossil fuels to make things and move things around.

The lack of investment in new publicly owned generation is major part of the story why Pickering is continuing to operate well beyond its original life span and is (highly) likely going to be refurbished. We simply do not have an alternative in place that can fill the void of the current 3000MW and the post-refurb 2000MW generation.

Right now, we do not have room to shut Pickering off because Darlington and Bruce nuclear power stations are undergoing their own refurbishment.

Darlington is actually ahead of schedule and on budget. Bruce is over budget and behind schedule. Though you will not hear that because that's not supposed to happen as Darlington is a publicly owned nuclear development and Bruce is operated through a private consortium.

There is a lot of nuclear power in this province.

Installed capacity:

• Pickering: 3,100 MW across current six units.
• Darlington: 3,500 MW (4 units)
• Bruce: 6,300 MW (8 units)

That makes up about 50% of our current electricity needs.

The strident anti-nuclear policy folks will tell you that it is possible to make up this difference with alternative low-carbon sources, but I have serious questions around that math. It might have been possible if we had developed publicly owned low-carbon over-capacity generation and energy storage over the previous decades and not relied on gas plants to power our system as we moved from coal. But, I think this could only have happened under a different economic system and certainly not how most anti-nuclear liberal green politics folks think generation is built.

The fact is, as power workers put it, if we want to replace fossil fuel electricity generation, it is likely that we are going to build more nuclear generation.

Does that mean we have a plan around what that means for the planet and future generations? Hardly. That would require a system where we plan energy generation as if we believed in climate change and a transition to a future where green electricity replaces fossil fuels.

This also does not really get at two burning issues.

1. We still burn a tonne of greenhouse effect causing natural gas to power our electricity grids.
2. We are on course for a large electricity generation deficit even with all that gas and nuclear coming on board.

It is pretty clear that these are the two additional reasons we see fewer people opposing nuclear generation these days than we did in the past.

Of course, the capitalist economy-based one-way street to nuclear power does not solve a single problem listed above. In fact, the economic model we are building these things under makes the issues worse.

Future generations (if there are any) will wonder what we all were thinking over the previous 100 years. And, they will be correct in doing so.

Nuclear energy is a lot like fossil-fuel energy once you look beyond the green house gas generation difference. We are in such a rush to use its massive power potential that we do not think too hard about the consequences. While the use of the technology is itself can be dangerous in accidents (just like any energy source from oil, gas, to hydro), the main issue is the end-product.

The economic and its accompanying political system is not set-up to deal with this issue. Sure, we study it, but we have not come to a conclusion of what to do with nuclear waste. We have not even figured out how to label nuclear waste to tell people in the future that it is nuclear waste stored in a spot.

That's rather shocking for a society that thinks of itself as "advanced".

While I personally do not think that these problems are theoretically insurmountable, I think it is clear we are not thinking very hard about anything as a society and am very concerned this means this issue may be insurmountable in real life. We lock ourselves into these paths of least resistance until catastrophe lands to force us to move, even if we saw the inevitability of reaching that catastrophe along our chosen path.

Changing course takes work, and for electricity generation it also takes a particular type of economics and orientation to politics. That is one that we are sorely missing.

The left must start that conversation on dealing with the reality we have in front of us. How to build increasing generation capacity, what the energy mix should be, how much we need to invest to get those mixes working for us, and how we should manage all that.

Not to mention the industrial policies necessary to make it all work.

A briefing note from me on the facts of the Pickering Refurbishment here (this also not for redistribution).