The Pickering Nuclear power plant is getting a new lease on life.
Ontario Energy Minister Todd Smith said work to refurbish four reactors at the 53-year-old facility would begin later this year, with plans to be fully operational by the mid-2030s.
“A major overhaul of four of the generators is going to have a huge impact,” Smith said.
About 14 per cent of Ontario’s electricity is produced at the Pickering Generating Station. When complete, it will be able to produce two thousand megawatts of clean electricity to roughly two million homes across the province.
Smith says that power will be needed to meet the province’s growing population.
“Our government is building at least one and a half million new homes by 2031 to meet that rising demand. With all that growth comes new energy needs and luckily Ontario is already home to one of the cleanest electricity grids in the world and one of the most resilient, in large part thanks to the diversity of our energy supply,” Smith said.
Ontario Energy Minister Todd Smith speaks at Pickering Nuclear power plant on January 30 Photo credit: YouTube
The province hasn’t disclosed the budget for the refurbishment.
Matthew Mairinger is the President of North American Young Generation in Nuclear, a professional association for people working in the nuclear industry. He’s pleased that the aging plant will no longer be phased out.
“I’d say we had a major risk with Pickering coming to its end of life. We were going to lose about two thousand megawatts of clean electricity,” Mairinger said.
He said when nuclear plants in California or Germany were shut down, the power they produced was replaced by fossil fuels.
Ontario Power Generation says the experience they’ve had from refurbishments of the Darlington Nuclear Station, as well as Bruce Power, makes them confident the refurbishment will be successful.
The federal government has a goal to produce clean electricity with regulations that would require all future power plants to produce net-zero carbon emissions.
Mairinger says this refurbishment will help Ontario reach that goal.
“We’re going to need nuclear as baseload technology, we’re going to need energy efficiency, we’re going to need renewables and then we’re also going to need new technologies like carbon capture. And those are going to require a lot of low carbon electricity to get us there.”
Once completed, the government expects the reactors will be able to function for another 30 years.