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Six reactors gone at Pickering. Two deactivated at Bruce by 2022, and at least one at Darlington between 2022 and 2025.

Here’s the thing: Chiarelli announced that the Bruce project won’t start until 2020, “to maximize value of the units” (that is, to run them for as long as possible before fixing them up). But that’s a delay of four years from the previous plan, and it means not beginning to refurbish the Bruce reactors until the Pickering ones are already wound down.

That’s over 5,000 megawatts cut from the system at once. Our power surplus is not that big, and not all the time. And that’s assuming everything goes according to plan, which has not been Ontario’s historical experience with nuclear projects.

By the 2020s we’ll have more wind and solar farms, possibly more deals to import hydro from our neighbours. The government continues to work on conservation.

But the bulk of the difference will likely be made up by the 20 gas-fired generating stations Ontario constructed in the late 2000s. They’re easy to turn on and off, independent of weather conditions like sun and wind, pretty efficient. Several thousand megawatts on standby.

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They’re also polluters: they burn a fossil fuel, and that means carbon emissions. Burning natural gas is only about half as bad for the greenhouse effect as burning coal, and spits out nothing like the amount of tiny smog-making soot particles, but it’s still pretty bad. Forty times the emissions of nuclear power, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which tried to factor in everything from extraction to generation to waste disposal when it ran its numbers.

It’ll be a temporary spike, but that still means millions of tonnes of carbon emissions, right after we’ve crowed about leading in the opposite direction.

Ottawa Citizen

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com

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