Carney’s Nuclear Detour: Darlington’s SMRs Will Increase Costs, Emissions, & Political Dangers

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In October 2025, the federal authorities formally designated the four-unit SMR construct at Ontario Energy Technology’s Darlington website as a “Main Undertaking” and invested $2 billion via the Canada Progress Fund, alongside $1 billion from the provincial Constructing Ontario Fund, signalling that the federal authorities views the SMR programme each as a national-industrial precedence and a pillar of Canada’s clean-power technique. This upfront funding and symbolic anointment embed the SMR scheme on the core of Prime Minister Carney’s climate-industrial agenda—tying his legacy to its success and subjecting his broader ambitions to the reactor’s efficiency.

Ontario as soon as led the world in nuclear engineering. The province constructed its grid round CANDU reactors designed, manufactured, and operated by Canadians. These heavy-water machines offered many years of dependable electrical energy and created hundreds of high-skill jobs. In addition they anchored a home provide chain that made Canada one of many few nations with full nuclear sovereignty. Now, because the world turns towards versatile, low-cost renewables, Ontario is making a unique wager. With Mark Carney’s backing and the provincial authorities’s enthusiasm, it’s constructing the primary GE Hitachi small modular reactor at Darlington. It’s a resolution that can look visionary to some at this time, however in a decade it should appear to be a strategic error.

Carney’s ambition to construct a clear, safe industrial future for Canada is real. His financial credibility and local weather focus give him the ethical authority to behave. However in aligning himself with an American-owned, first-of-a-kind reactor expertise, he has made a alternative that can come again to hang-out him. The challenge guarantees jobs, power safety, and innovation, nevertheless it delivers greater prices, higher complexity, and new dependencies. The proof is already clear. Ontario Energy Technology’s Darlington website is the province’s largest single employer, and the refurbishment program for the present reactors is offering regular, high-paying work. The brand new SMRs are usually not wanted to maintain that prosperity. What they may convey is monetary publicity and an power combine much less aligned with what Ontario truly wants.

Darlington alone employs roughly 15,000 individuals immediately and not directly in a area with solely 70,000 staff. These jobs are safe for many years via ongoing refurbishment and operations, with the present CANDU reactors anticipated to be prolonged to 2065, an unprecedented 80+ years. Common wages are among the many highest within the province. It’s by far the biggest and finest paying employer round. Including 4 small modular reactors doesn’t create a brand new employment base. It diverts billions of {dollars} towards a first-of-a-kind nuclear experiment that might be constructed by overseas expertise distributors and managed underneath unfamiliar regulatory frameworks. For the area, this isn’t an financial improvement challenge. It’s an engineering gamble wrapped within the rhetoric of innovation.

The GE Hitachi BWRX-300 is a light-water boiling reactor that bears little resemblance to the CANDU methods Ontario’s nuclear workforce is aware of intimately. It requires enriched uranium, not pure gasoline. It has a hard and fast refuelling cycle, not steady on-power refuelling. It depends upon U.S. provide chains for core elements and gasoline assemblies. Ontario’s nuclear professionals, from control-room operators to upkeep crews, have spent their careers mastering CANDU methods. They must relearn a completely completely different expertise underneath a regulatory regime nonetheless being outlined. The Canadian Nuclear Security Fee has no working precedent for this design, and its licensing course of have to be harmonized with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Fee. The result’s a challenge that mixes first-of-a-kind technical threat with first-of-its-kind regulatory uncertainty.

Bent Flyvbjerg’s megaproject database—now within the tens of hundreds of instances throughout sectors—exhibits nuclear among the many worst performers for value and schedule reliability, with a devoted nuclear new-build reference class of roughly 194 initiatives utilized in latest threat analyses. From that file, reference class forecasting (RCF) provides decision-grade uplifts: at P50, add about +67% to capital and +40% to schedule; at P80, plan for roughly +202% capital and +104% schedule. In observe, you are taking Ontario’s inside-view funds and timeline for the Darlington BWRX-300, apply the chosen P-level uplifts to supply an out-turn value and commercial-operation window, and measurement contingencies, financing, and tariff impacts from these outside-view figures—not from inner estimates that historical past says are systematically optimistic.

The monetary penalties might be vital. Nuclear megaprojects are persistently among the many worst performers in value and schedule. Even small reactors face the identical challenges: lengthy development timelines, bespoke elements, and escalating financing prices. Reference-class forecasting of world nuclear builds suggests P80 value overruns above 200% and schedule slips past 100%. Meaning Darlington’s first SMR, now budgeted at about six billion {dollars}, may simply value greater than eighteen billion and arrive half a decade late. The smaller bodily footprint is not going to reserve it from the identical financial gravity that has plagued each different nuclear construct of the previous half century.

Ontario is already spending closely to make its current nuclear fleet work in a contemporary grid. Baseload inflexibility forces the system operator to curtail renewable technology and dump surplus energy at a loss to neighboring markets. The Impartial Electrical energy System Operator has acknowledged the issue and is investing in flexibility providers—increasing pure gasoline crops, procuring battery storage, and reforming market buildings—to steadiness rigid provide. These gasoline crops in Napanee, Windsor, and St. Clair will emit hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide annually. The paradox is inescapable: Ontario is including extra fossil technology to handle extra nuclear technology. A province that might have achieved the identical reliability via cheaper renewable firming is selecting to make its grid dirtier and dearer.

The economics of that alternative are stark. Firmed wind and photo voltaic already ship electrical energy at round $60 to $100 per MWh in Ontario. The danger-adjusted levelized value of power for small modular reactors is anticipated to vary between $160 and $370 {dollars} per MWh, properly above the publicly acknowledged $106 to $146 per MWh, even with low public-sector borrowing prices. Ontario may triple its renewable technology and construct large-scale storage for lower than the price of one first-of-a-kind SMR challenge. As an alternative, it’s locking itself into many years of upper costs and better emissions.

There’s additionally the geopolitical dimension. The GE Hitachi reactor is an American design, topic to U.S. export controls and ruled by U.S. mental property legislation. Canada is presently a most popular vacation spot for nuclear expertise underneath U.S. Half 810 rules, however that standing is a coverage alternative, not a treaty proper. A future administration in Washington may alter the foundations with little warning. Gasoline provide is equally uncovered. The USA has banned imports of Russian low-enriched uranium, tightening world provide. Ontario’s SMRs will rely upon that very same market. The result’s a future through which Canada’s nuclear baseload depends on the steadiness of U.S. politics and gasoline markets—an uncomfortable place for a rustic looking for power sovereignty.

It’s placing, virtually perverse, that whereas Canada and Donald Trump’s U.S. administration are locked in full-blown commerce battle—with tariffs, threats of annexation and bilateral negotiations abruptly terminated—Ontario remains to be committing billions to construct a nuclear programme underneath U.S.-owned vendor management. In 2025 President Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on Canadian exports and abruptly ended commerce talks over a provincial promoting marketing campaign. But on the similar second Ontario is embracing a reactor design owned and managed by a U.S. agency, topic to U.S. export-controls and fuel-supply dependencies. The contradiction is evident: when U.S. coverage in the direction of Canada has turned hostile, Ontario is doubling down on U.S. nuclear expertise relatively than minimising strategic threat.

AtkinsRealis, previously SNC-Lavalin, sits in the course of this challenge as a significant engineering associate. The corporate has cleaned up its governance after the corruption scandal that broken Justin Trudeau’s authorities, however its legacy stays politically delicate. Its CANDU Vitality division is the steward of Canada’s indigenous nuclear expertise and the guts of its nuclear experience. Within the SMR challenge, AtkinsRealis is not the expertise chief neither is it the nuclear expertise professional; it’s an engineering contractor supporting a overseas vendor. It’s 800 or so CANDU specialists don’t have any historical past or experience with the GE SMR or the underlying nuclear technology method. That reintroduces political threat. Carney, who has watched governments fall over procurement controversies, ought to acknowledge the hazard of counting on a agency with that historical past in a challenge of this scale. Certainly one of Trudeau’s strategic missteps was not paying adequate consideration to the SNC Lavalin file till it bit him politically, and Carney is now uncovered to the agency as properly, though to a lesser diploma.

Ontario’s grid doesn’t want extra nuclear baseload. It wants flexibility, dispatchability, and affordability. Nuclear already provides greater than half of the province’s electrical energy, and that dominance creates structural inefficiencies. Strategically, Ontario ought to intention to scale back nuclear’s share under 40% whereas increasing renewable and storage capability. The province’s geography, hydro reservoirs, and interties make that attainable. Including extra nuclear capability—particularly in small, costly, and rigid models—strikes in the wrong way. It will increase surplus baseload technology, depresses export costs, and requires fossil backup. It’s a system-level error disguised as an innovation.

Projecting ahead to the mid-2030s, the sample is predictable. Prices will climb as the primary unit faces engineering surprises. Subsequent models might be delayed as classes are absorbed. Fuel-plant emissions will rise to cowl flexibility shortfalls. Ratepayers will see regular will increase in electrical energy costs. Renewables and storage will proceed to fall in value however might be sluggish to increase as a result of public capital is tied up in nuclear development. Ontario’s power independence will decline as American suppliers, regulators, and buyers achieve affect over its most important infrastructure. This isn’t a state of affairs born of pessimism. It’s merely what occurs when the previous many years of nuclear challenge information are utilized to new guarantees. Canada isn’t China, the place they’ve managed to not less than stabilize prices of recent nuclear reactors as an alternative of seeing them rise.

Carney’s intentions are usually not doubtful. He needs to decarbonize, to reindustrialize, and to reveal that Canada can lead in clear power. However the Darlington SMR resolution doesn’t obtain these goals. It substitutes nationwide experience with imported expertise, trades affordability for status, and deepens dependence on a unstable neighbor. It ignores the system-level economics of renewables and the present structural benefits of Ontario’s grid. Ultimately, it might produce a working reactor, however at a price measured not solely in {dollars} however in alternative misplaced.

Ontario’s nuclear historical past is a supply of delight, nevertheless it shouldn’t be a constraint. The province has all the pieces it wants—hydro, wind, photo voltaic, storage potential, and engineering expertise—to construct a contemporary, versatile, low-carbon grid with out one other nuclear megaproject. Selecting to construct GE Hitachi’s small modular reactors as an alternative will burden Ontarians with greater electrical energy prices, greater emissions, and a dependency that weakens nationwide sovereignty. It’s a resolution that Carney and the province will come to remorse, not as a result of their objectives have been incorrect, however as a result of their chosen means couldn’t ship them.