On February 2, 2026, Energy Minister Stephen Lecce stood at Darlington Nuclear Generating Station and announced the refurbishment was done: four months early, $150 million under budget. Applause, handshakes, the rare good-news photo op. And then, almost in the same breath, the much larger number: $26.8 billion for Pickering, greenlit three months earlier, execution starting 2027. Add that to the $12.8 billion already spent at Darlington and Ontario Power Generation has committed roughly $39.6 billion to nuclear refurbishment in a single decade. Whether Lecce’s victory lap was a sign of competence or the opening scene of something much riskier depends on which project you’re looking at.
Darlington: The Case For
February 2, 2026. Energy Minister Stephen Lecce announced that the fourth and final reactor at Darlington had been refurbished four months ahead of schedule and $150 million under budget. For a nuclear project, that is genuinely rare. The world’s largest nuclear refurbishment, completed on time. Full stop.
All four refurbished units together will deliver more than 3,500 MW of capacity, enough to power 3.5 million homes, and the station’s life is now extended to at least 2055. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission issued a 20-year operating licence in September 2025, the longest ever granted to a Canadian nuclear plant, authorizing operations until November 2045. OPG projects the economic benefit to Ontario over the station’s extended life at up to $90 billion.
Lecce, who has made the nuclear file a signature of the 44th Parliament, was not shy about the political value of the milestone. “When you look at that model of every asset being able to deliver unit refurbishments on time, on schedule, or even ahead of it,” he told committee, “I think it demonstrates confidence that there are systems that are robust.” He has a point. Ontario’s track record on the Darlington refurbishment is the strongest counter-argument available to anyone skeptical of what comes next.
Pickering: The Much Larger Bet
What comes next is Pickering, and the numbers get bigger in every direction.
CAD$26.8 billion to refurbish four CANDU reactors at the Pickering station east of Toronto. Execution phase begins in early 2027, with completion targeted for the mid-2030s. The refurbished plant would deliver 2,200 MW, up from roughly 2,000 MW today, enough to power 2.2 million homes for up to 38 more years.
The jobs argument is real: roughly 30,500 construction jobs and 6,700 ongoing operations positions, with 85 to 90 percent of spending projected to stay in Ontario. A Conference Board of Canada study estimates the project will add $38.2 billion to Ontario’s GDP and $41.6 billion to Canada’s national GDP over its lifespan. Those are numbers the government is very happy to put in front of voters in Durham Region.
Pickering currently holds a licence to operate until the end of 2028. OPG has applied to the CNSC for a 10-year licence covering refurbishment activities, a regulatory approval that is still pending. The project doesn’t move without it.
What Bill 40 Actually Changes
Tucked inside the government’s broader energy legislation is something that deserves more attention than it has received. Bill 40, the Protecting Ontario by Securing Affordable Energy for Generations Act, 2025, passed in the 44th Parliament, adds economic growth as a formal objective of Ontario’s energy agencies. That sounds anodyne.
Less anodyne: the bill also gives the government additional flexibility to determine how much of the costs payable to generators are recovered from taxpayers versus ratepayers. In plain language, the Ford government now has more room to decide whether nuclear costs show up on your electricity bill or in the provincial budget. Both are public money, but the accounting looks very different depending on which pocket it comes from. The opposition noticed.
NDP MPP Jamie West raised the rate question directly in October 2025 committee hearings, pointing out that the Ontario Energy Board had just announced electricity rates would rise nearly 3 percent starting November 1. He drew an explicit line to the Liberal-era private contracts that drove hydro bills to politically toxic levels in the 2010s. Lecce’s response was to point back at Darlington’s on-time performance. The exchange captures the fundamental impasse: the government has a genuine achievement to point to, and the opposition has a genuine historical precedent to point to. Neither side is wrong.
Electricity prices in Ontario have already risen 29 percent in recent years, according to the National Observer, partly tied to nuclear spending.
That’s not a comfortable number to sit with.
The Gas Problem Nobody Loves to Talk About
Context: Ontario’s grid is currently about 50% nuclear. Under the government’s plan, nuclear would supply roughly 75% of the province’s electricity by 2050, while demand is projected to grow 75% over the same period.
Here is the inconvenient part of the timeline. Pickering’s four B reactors will come offline for refurbishment starting in 2027. During that period, somewhere around 2,000 MW of current generating capacity goes dark. Ontario’s grid still needs to run.
The gap gets filled with natural gas. The province’s own energy plan shows greenhouse gas emissions rising during the refurbishment window, with little in the way of renewables or storage ready to absorb the load. Environmental Defence called the decision “a costly and high-risk choice,” arguing that nuclear’s inflexibility as a baseload source (it cannot ramp up or down with demand) forces the entire grid to engineer around it, leaving gas plants as the perpetual balancing mechanism.
Pembina Institute’s David Pickup took a less categorical position, acknowledging the refurbishment may be necessary while arguing Ontario still needs “many different energy options and many projects,” not a near-total reliance on large nuclear builds. Under current projections, nuclear would supply roughly 75 percent of Ontario’s electricity by 2050. Ontario’s grid is already about 50 percent nuclear today.
The Ford government’s counter is demand: Ontario’s electricity needs are projected to grow 75 percent by 2050, driven by EV adoption, industrial electrification, and data centre expansion. At that scale, the argument goes, you cannot get there on wind and solar alone. Ontario Hydro tried gas in the 1990s and got stranded debt. Germany tried wind and solar and ended up burning more coal. The honest answer is that no jurisdiction has cleanly solved this at scale, which does not make a $26.8 billion bet automatically right, but does complicate the criticism.
The Historical Debt Warning
Policy Options raised the uncomfortable historical parallel in March 2026: by the turn of the millennium, Ontario Hydro’s nuclear-heavy strategy had saddled it with $38.1 billion in debt, $20.9 billion of it stranded. The corporation did not survive it. Ontarians are still paying a “debt retirement charge” on their electricity bills decades later (technically removed from bills in 2016, but absorbed into the rate base).
That history does not mean the current plan fails. It means the plan needs to work. Darlington’s refurbishment came in under budget. Pickering’s refurbishment has not started yet.
Ontario Nuclear Refurbishment Costs
Generating Capacity (Post-Refurbishment)
Beyond Refurbishment: The Expansion Layer
Refurbishment is actually the conservative part of Ontario’s nuclear agenda. The government is also advancing a small modular reactor at Darlington, for which OPG began construction in May 2025 after receiving a CNSC licence. Pre-development work is underway at Bruce Power for a new facility called Bruce C. OPG is in early-stage planning for a large nuclear installation at its Wesleyville site in Port Hope.
Liberal MPP Ted Hsu, who sits on the energy committee, flagged the SMR specifically, noting that its technology differs from CANDU reactors and “there may be some things to work out,” and that it would need to be cost-effective if it is going to be exported. That is a reasonable observation. SMRs have not been built at commercial scale anywhere in the world. Darlington’s SMR would be the first in the G7.
Ford signed a cross-border nuclear cooperation agreement with New York Governor Kathy Hochul in December 2025, framing Ontario as the global leader in nuclear innovation. Lecce has said the integrated energy plan will deliver 99 percent of the grid net zero through hydro and nuclear.
The ambition is not in question. What’s less certain is whether a plan this dependent on a single technology category, built over a timeline measured in decades, leaves enough room for the things that tend to go wrong.
Pickering’s licence application is still before the CNSC. The refurbishment doesn’t start until 2027. And the $26.8 billion figure is the approved budget, not the final cost.
Sources and verification: Darlington refurbishment completion details, budget figures, and timeline are confirmed via CBC News (Feb. 2, 2026) and World Nuclear News. Pickering refurbishment cost ($26.8B), output figures, and job numbers are sourced from World Nuclear News, Global News, and National Observer (Nov. 2025). Bill 40 details are drawn from Ontario Hansard (Oct. 30, 2025, ola.org). The 29% electricity price increase figure is from the National Observer (Nov. 2025) and should be verified against current OEB rate data. The $38.1B Ontario Hydro stranded debt figure is sourced from Policy Options (March 2026) and is consistent with previously published figures, but readers should note this covers total debt, not nuclear-specific debt alone. Conference Board of Canada GDP projections are cited via World Nuclear News and have not been independently reviewed.
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