Gordon Edwards: Port Hope video, June 17, 2026, re. Plans for World's Largest Nuclear Plant.
- Arni Muras
- Jun 17
- 2 min read
Gordon Edwards June.
Friends and Colleagues -
Ontario Power Generation is Canada’s principal nuclear utility with 16 operational CANDU nuclear reactors—
8 of them on Lake Huron at the Brue Nuclear Complex, 4 of them at Pickering just east of Toronto, and 4 more
at Darlington just east of Pickering. The latter ones are on the northern shore of Lake Ontario.At the Darlington site, construction is underway for the first of four so-called “SMNRs”—the BWRX-300, by GE-Hitachi.
In addition to those 8 already on Lake Ontario, OPG has announced its intention to build the largest nuclear plant in the world—10,000 megawatts electrical—just outside the town of Port Hope, east of Darlington.
This new proposal is called the Wesleyville New Nuclear Plant. The exact design of the reactors has not been decided; they could be CANDUs or they could be something quite different, such as the AP1000 reactors built in Georgia at exorbitant cost. Westinghouse went bankrupt in 2017 over two other AP1000s that were cancelled in South Carolina.
Six years later, Westinghouse was bought by two Canadian companies—Cameco (49%) and Brookfield Financial (51%).
The current Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, was in charge of Brookfield investments when the Westinghouse deal was finalized. Mr. Carney has been convinced by nuclear proponents that nuclear is the key to fighting climate change, even though renewable energy sources (with storage) are substantially cheaper. He is strongly promoting the building of large nuclear plants throughout Canada, with 4 planned for Northern Alberta and 4 more planned for the Bruce site on Lake Huron.
I was invited to speak in Port Hope on June 17, 2026, on the Wesleyville proposal—one of a series of public meetings sponsored by the Port Hope Community Health Concerns Committee. Here is a recreation of that talk using an audio recording by Michael Hopfner and the slides used during the presentation.
Cheers,
Gordon Edwards.
P.S. Port Hope is world-famous as one of only five Uranium Hexafluoride facilities in the western world, working in tandem with the world’s largest uranium refinery at Blind River, Ontario—both facilities that are owned and operated by Cameco, the uranium giant that dominates Saskatchewan’s uranium industry. The town is undergoing a $2.6 billion radioactive “cleanup” involving extensive remediation (decontamination) of several hundreds of buildings. This “cleanup” dates back to 1975, when an elementary school had to be evacuated due to very high radon levels in the school cafeteria caused by the use of radioactive waste in the foundations and playground of the school. The same radioactive waste material was used for construction all around town. Close to two million tons of radioactive debris have been collected and are now stored in two gigantic earthen mounds, designed to last for 500 years after which the plans for the waste will be revisited.
Gordon.
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