Pickering Nuclear: Old and unsafe

The Pickering Nuclear Station is one of the oldest nuclear plants in the world. It has a long history of accidents and safety concerns and is now well past its official retirement age.   It is also surrounded by more people — 2.2 million — than any other nuclear plant in North America.  If a Fukushima-scale accident happened at the Pickering Nuclear Station, more than 650,000 people could lose their homes and have to be evacuated for 30-100 years.  Tens of thousands of GTA residents could develop cancers.

40 Years and Counting: A timeline of the Pickering Nuclear Plant.

The Pickering Plant is also a storehouse for an enormous amount of radioactive waste—more than 15 million kilograms of deadly spent fuel.  The more than 760,000 spent fuel bundles stored at Pickering laid end to end would stretch from Kingston to St. Catharines. As well as dangerous radioactive elements, these bundles include enough plutonium to build more than 11,000 nuclear warheads.

Fortunately, we have plenty of safer and lower cost alternatives to continuing to run this old nuclear station, including getting power from Quebec.  Power from Quebec would cost roughly half as much as power from Pickering, making it possible to lower our power bills while removing eight very old reactors from our largest urban area.

Right now, Ontario Power Generation (OPG)  says it will close the plant in 2024 and lay off most of its workforce while leaving the plant sitting on the Pickering waterfront untouched for the following 30 years. A better plan is to adopt the international best practice of immediate decommissioning.  If we close the plant in 2024 and immediately start dismantling it, we can create 32,000 person years of employment and revitalize a big piece of the Pickering waterfront for the enjoyment of the community.

Take a look at what Mississauga is doing with the site of the old Lakeview Coal Plant.