Cenovus pulled the plug on its much-ballyhooed ‘multi-year’ study of ‘small modular reactors’ in 2024 after a year

The little hamlet where I’m from on the old shoreline of Lake Iroquois, today is about 500 feet elevation above Lake Ontario –that is, after global warming evaporated the ancient glacial lake . Our kitchen windows faced Pickering, about 1o miles south on the Lake, so when the white reactor domes of what would become the world’s largest nuclear power plant appeared to rise from behind the gable of the 2-room school house in our front field, where I was a pupil, they might have been considered an aesthetic blotch upon beautiful, ocean-like vista of the Great Lake from our lofty vantage.

Yet back then Pickering symbolized progress, and we were all proud, no doubt because of positive government propaganda. The first boomers were yet teenagers and the recent World War was still us younger boys’ favourite game. Somehow the construction of Pickering got through the Cuban Missile Crisis without the kind of protests we might expect nowadays. Even my old man, who was in the War–the one which ended with a nuclear mushroom cloud–was okay with it. People wanted to trust government back then–cuz the War…

Many years later I spent a season on Notion Road, just half a mile from Moody’s pub in downtown Pickering; the long shadows of winter dusk cast the nuclear plant’s silhouette on the last residence among the factories sprouting up all around us and supplied us with concrete spattered firewood over an exceptionally cold winter. The Lake froze, except for Frenchman’s Bay where the plant exchanged coolant water and exotic pipe gars and lampreys could be caught (and dutifully euthanized).

The Chalk River nuclear research reactor near Montreal partially melted down in the previous decade, the world’s first nuclear accident, and a second one occurred there in 1958. Nonetheless, people were confident the huge Pickering plant employed lessons learned and the most modern safety design. We bought it.

PR radiated outward, inviting school excursions to tour the facility. I remember our Cub Scout pack sitting in the plush auditorium where a very slick spokesman in an expensive 3-piece suit and pointed Italian shoes boasted of the plant’s failsafe features and, while lighting up a Benson&Hedges cigarette from a gold case (back then most teachers and parents reeked so much of tobacco that it was easy to get away with underage smoking–which in retrospect harmed me more than ionizing radiation ever did) waxed eloquently of the benefits to our province. Indeed, the plant generated a substantial amount of Ontario’s electricity and sold it cheap, all without the ugly smokestacks of coal-fired generation –which, truth be known, were hardly missed amongst all the other industrial stacks that cluttered the lakeshore from Oshawa all the way around to Rochester, NY–until AFTA wiped them out, at least on the Canadian side of the Lake.

All that changed with Chernobyl. I was in a tree-planting camp in the mountains of southeast BC on that day: the crew gathered around the crummy’s radio, wondering if the radioactive cloud would pass over us as initially reported, and if we should shelter in a nearby abandoned mine. I realized my Russian language classes at UVic would be for nought (when my sister-in-law later visited post-Soviet Russia, her report pretty much scotched my dream of visiting the land of FD, my favourite author, for good).

Next time I returned to Ontario the Pickering plant had replaced my old man’s usual grumbles. He’d been to a packed town hall meeting. “They said we’d have to evacuate if Pickering melts down–maybe permanently! We’re in the zone!!” There were several reactors at the plant by that time, most of them mothballed for maintenance–and the bills were starting to rankle taxpayers.

Then of course the politics. When I read that premier Mike Harris’s Conservative government suddenly announced it would privatize Ontario Hydro, I smelled a ghostly-green, glowing rat. When an injunction was granted to stop the hasty IPO and customers were apprised that their hydro bills would triple, Harris suddenly resigned–supposedly because of a police impropriety. His finance minster became premier, called an election and the Big Blue Machine was thoroughly thrashed, generating waves that radiated across the country, convincing BC Liberal premier Gordon Campbell to rethink his similar privatization plan for BC Hydro. Although both their pickles were ostensibly about other things, it’s important to remember that the initial spark was the growing difficulty in rationalizing the cost of maintaining nuclear power generation in Ontario. The money, not the health hazard.

Nuclear was a dead letter for about a decade until, as I recall, I first spotted positive mention tucked discretely in the back pages of investment and mining journals. Stock values of nuclear concerns slowly began to percolate upward. My neighbour told me his broker put some of these stocks in his portfolio; he wouldn’t have told me if they weren’t doing well. Apparently nuke-chill had sufficiently cooled off again. Politicians were getting better at being handmaidens to profiteers.

That’s when SMRs made their debut, slowly, carefully so’s not to spook skitterish electorates. The rationale, of course, was to cook bitumen in the kitchens of Sandy bitumen in no-stick fashion. The Big-B industry had already begun calling it “ethical oil,” presumably after failing to convince the public that it was “clean”–like natural gas. Apparently people are more afraid of slowly cooking conventionally than they are of fast-frying atomically. Worse, they don’t trust politicians who must now practice their art by stealth. The snowball of suspicion would get bigger if it weren’t melting so fast.

Carbon capture, SMRs, “ethical oil” and much more are all a crock, as people know but don’t want to admit. It’s easy to bamboozle the public into accepting industry’s supposed mitigations by subsidizing the opposite. It’s perversity now in overdrive.

The good news is, the whole shitteroo folds when the public teat is turned off. Should be easy, right? Avi Lewis thinks so.