According to the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, the Pickering Nuclear Station’s performance is “persistently abysmal… by any objective measure.”
Ontario Power Generation admits that Pickering’s operating costs are higher than those of any other nuclear station in North America
Half of the power produced by Pickering is exported at a loss, costing Ontario electricity ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Ontario can lower its electricity costs by $1.1 to $1.4 billion per year by closing the Pickering Nuclear Station and importing cleaner, safer and lower-cost water power from Quebec.
The savings would be so great that we could pay every Pickering worker $1 million in severance and we would still save billions!
Sign the petition to close Pickering!
The International Atomic Energy Association recommends immediate decommissioning for closed nuclear plants. This would create thousands of hours of work over a decade or more as the plant is dismantled and waste is moved to more secure facilities.
The people of Pickering would then have a roughly 700-acre waterfront site ready for redevelopment – just as Mississauga is redeveloping the site of the old Lakeview coal station.
It would also mean that we stop accumulating close to 20,000 radioactive fuel bundles every year that are added to the huge pile – 700,000 bundles – already being held on the Pickering waterfront. There is no long-term storage site for this waste anywhere in North America, and not likely to be one soon.
We all win by closing Pickering: electricity consumers save big; Pickering workers are rewarded; and we remove an aging and dangerous nuclear plant from our largest urban area, where it simply doesn’t belong.
Read the full report: How we can make every Pickering nuclear worker a millionaire and save Ontario electricity consumers $5 billion
