Canada Plans 10 New Nuclear Plants, Asks Pensioners If They'd Mind Funding Them
Ottawa has floated a modest proposal: build up to ten new nuclear plants, and quietly ask the country's pension funds to write the cheque. The pitch to retirees is that splitting atoms is a stable, long-term investment, roughly on par with a GIC, only with more concrete and slightly more paperwork.
Officials stress the plants will be safe, on-budget, and completed on schedule, three claims that have never previously appeared together in a Canadian infrastructure sentence. The last reactor refurbishment at Darlington ran years long and billions over, which the government now describes as valuable practice.
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which currently owns toll roads in Chile and warehouses in New Jersey, is being asked to consider whether a CANDU in northern Ontario might round out the portfolio. Retirees were not consulted directly, on the grounds that they might have opinions.
Supporters note that nuclear is clean, reliable, and produces vastly fewer emissions than a natural gas plant or a federal cabinet meeting about natural gas plants. Critics point out that ten plants is an ambitious number for a country that spent eleven years debating a single pipeline and still cannot agree on what to call the tunnel under the harbour in Halifax.
A senior official promised the funding model would be transparent, then clarified he meant transparent to the Department of Finance, not to the public, or the pensioners, or anyone who might later ask where the money went.