Size of New Ontario Nuclear Plant Triples

With little fanfare, the government of the Canadian province of Ontario has almost tripled the size of a planned nuclear power plant, the Toronto Star reported.

In its requests for proposals, the government’s latest call is to provide roughly 2,000-3,500 (megawatts) of baseload generation capacity.

Energy Minister Gerry Phillips told the newspaper the original plan was to build a facility to generate 1,400 megawatts using two 700-megawatt Candu reactors. But he said technology has advanced since then.

The average size of the plants has gone up, he said. At the time (reactors) were 700 megawatts … Now reactors are more 1,000 megawatts to 1,600 megawatts.

Keith Stewart, an environmentalist with World Wildlife Fund-Canada, told the Star it was a case of political bait and switch to escape scrutiny.

Politically, refurbishments are a much easier sell, Stewart said. So you say it’s only going to be a little bit and then, ‘Oops, it’s much more.’ We’re going to see this more down the road when the costs start coming in.

The government expects to award a contract by the end of the year with groundbreaking planned for 2012 and power transmission by 2018, the report said.