FORD REAFFIRMS VOW TO KEEP PICKERING NUCLEAR SITE OPEN
SOUNDS LIKE IT’S FESTIVAL TIME Chris Botti performs on Day 1 of the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival at city hall on Thursday. The festival runs to July 1.
Ontario will keep the elderly nuclear plant in Pickering running until 2024, premier-designate Doug Ford repeated Thursday, for weird and un-conservative reasons.
“I believe in made-in- Ontario electricity and made-in- Ontario jobs,” Ford said at the plant.
There is nothing special about made-in- Ontario electricity. The Pickering plant’s energy doesn’t make your lights shine plaid or give off a faint mapley-piney aroma. There’s no difference between a joule from Ontario versus a joule from Quebec or a joule from New York.
More importantly, loving Ontario’s electricity system because it’s full of good jobs is one way governments spent decades messing it up.
The Pickering plant is Ontario’s oldest nuclear-power station and everyone agrees it’s in its last few years. The provincial government once planned to close it in 2020, but decided in 2016 to delay that for four years while the newer nuclear plants at Darlington and on the Bruce Peninsula get mid-life overhauls.
Those three nuclear facilities generate about 60 per cent of Ontario’s electricity. Keeping Pickering online while reactors at the other two sites are down will save us $600 million in costs to replace it with gas-fired generators, Ontario Power Generation estimates, and millions of tonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions.
“When the (Pickering) units were built the life expectancy was based on conservative calculations about the robustness of the components,” Ontario Power Generation explained at the time. “Since then operating experience around the world shows we can achieve more effective and fuller utilization of the existing plant to the benefit of Ontario electricity consumers.”
The Tory promise is to carry on with the plan for Pickering the Liberals left them. Bob Chiarelli was the minister who made the call. The really expensive part of nuclear energy is in building the reactors and refitting them, not running them day to day, so if we’ve got functional reactors we can keep using, we might as well doit.
Doug Ford made this as a defensive promise in the middle of the election campaign in May, when the New Democrats were surging. The power plant is a understandably a really big deal in Pickering, where star candidate Peter Bethlenfalvy — an almost sure shot for cabinet and even a potential finance minister — was running and ultimately won.
Ford trooped to Pickering on Thursday to emphasize how strongly he feels about keeping the promise.
Every single paragraph in the news release the Tories sent out to accompany Ford’s appearance talks about jobs. “This commitment will protect 4,500 local jobs in Durham Region,” “we will protect these jobs,” “part of a larger nuclear industry that supports 60,000 jobs across Ontario.” Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. Bombardier has good jobs, too. They require regular infusions of government money, which means they don’t make financial sense on their own, but the actual jobs pay well and employ highly-educated people. Ford holds Bombardier up as an evil example of corporate welfare run amok, and rightly so. You can make any job a good job if you divorce the pay from the value the job adds to the world.
Ontario developed a dogged devotion to nuclear energy out of economic nationalism. Nuclear energy symbolized our space-age can-do economy and supplied great high-tech employment. We built nuclear plants when hardly anyone else in Canada did. New Brunswick has one small nuclear plant; Quebec built one and shut it down when it got old. Other provinces have toyed with plans but always decided they weren’t worth the money or the risk.
Which is one reason Ontario Hydro ended its days $38 billion in debt. Generations of energy ministers have lamented the nuclear priesthood within the electricity industry, whose dictates and prerogatives even they dared not challenge.
The overruns and delays in building new nuclear plants here are legendary: billions of dollars, years of schedule slips. Darlington’s construction price was ballparked at $3.9 billion in the 1970s; it cost $14.4 billion by the time the last reactor started cracking atoms in quantity in 1993.
Twenty years of surcharges on electricity bills finally got us close to paying off Ontario Hydro’s zombie debt.
Favouring nuclear power because it creates jobs makes no more sense than favouring wind power because it creates jobs, which was the genesis of the Liberals’ Green Energy Act. The thinking was identical to the kind Ford’s expressed about the Pickering plant: We’ll support Ontario jobs in the solar and wind-turbine industries, both manufacturing and installing, and get made-in- Ontario electricity in the bargain.
The Progressive Conservatives have done well reminding us how that turned out.
The public electricity system should aim to give us reliable power as inexpensively as possible without compromising on reasonable pollution or safety standards. Asking it to be more than that has never turned out well and it won’t under the Tories, either.