page_title: Nuclear power in Canada
section_title: Nuclear power plants
hierarchical_section_title: Nuclear power in Canada / History / Nuclear power plants
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: La centrale nucléaire de Gentilly, seule centrale nucléaire commerciale au Québec. À gauche, la centrale de Gentilly-2. Hydro-Québec a exploité cette centrale de 1983 à 2012. À droite la ce du service en 1977. Elle est la propriété d'Énergie atomique du Canada limitée. English: The Gentilly Nuclear Generating Station is the only commercial nuclear power plant in Quebec. Left, the Gentilly-2 Nuclear Generating Station. Government-owned utility Hydro-Québec operated the plant from 1983 to 2012. Right, the Gentilly-1 plant, owned by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, closed down in 1977.
context_page_description: Nuclear power in Canada is provided by 19 commercial reactors with a net capacity of 13.5 Gigawatts, producing a total of 95.6 Terawatt-hours of electricity, which accounted for 16.6% of the country's total electric energy generation in 2015. All but one of these reactors are located in Ontario, where they produced 61% of that province's electricity in 2019. Seven smaller reactors are used for research and to produce radiopharmaceuticals for use in nuclear medicine.
  Canadian nuclear reactors are a type of pressurized heavy-water reactor of indigenous design, the CANDU reactor. CANDU reactors have been exported to India, Pakistan, Argentina, South Korea, Romania, and China.
context_section_description: In 1952, the Canadian government formed Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), a Crown corporation with the mandate to develop peaceful uses of nuclear energy. A partnership was formed between AECL, Ontario Hydro and Canadian General Electric to build Canada's first nuclear power plant, Nuclear Power Demonstration (NPD). The 20 MWₑ NPD started operation in June 1962 and demonstrated the unique concepts of on-power refueling using natural uranium fuel, and heavy water moderator and coolant. These features formed the basis of a fleet of CANDU power reactors (CANDU is an acronym for CANada Deuterium Uranium) built and operated in Canada and elsewhere. Starting in 1961, AECL led the construction of 24 commercial CANDU reactors in Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick.
  The first full-scale CANDU reactor entered service on September 26, 1968, at Douglas Point on the shore of Lake Huron in Ontario. Two years later a reactor of comparable power but of a different design became operational along the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec. Gentilly-1 was a prototype CANDU-BWR reactor with features intended to reduce its cost and complexity. After the equivalent of only 180 on-power days over nearly seven years (a 5.7% lifetime capacity factor), Gentilly-1 was closed in June 1977. Douglas Point, also suffering from unreliability with a lifetime capacity factor of 55.6%, was deemed a financial failure and shut down in May 1984.
  In August 1964, Ontario Hydro decided to build the first large scale nuclear power plant in Canada at Pickering on Lake Ontario, only 30 kilometres from downtown Toronto to save on transmission costs. To reduce cost the reactors share safety systems including containment and the emergency core cooling system. Pickering A station started operations in 1971 at a cost of $716 million (1965). It was followed by the Bruce A station, built in 1977 at a cost of $1.8 billion on the same site as the Douglas Point reactor. Beginning in 1983 four B reactors were added to the existing Pickering units, with all of them sharing the same common infrastructure as the A reactors. The final cost for these four new reactors was $3.84 billion (1986). Likewise for $6 billion, four new reactors were added to the Bruce site starting in 1984, but in a separate building with their own set of shared infrastructure for the new reactors. After a loss of coolant accident occurred at Pickering reactor A2 in August 1983, four of the reactors had their pressure tubes replaced between 1983 and 1993 at a cost of $1 billion (1983).
  As most of the development of nuclear energy was taking place in Ontario, Quebec nationalists were eager to benefit from a promising technology. Hydro-Quebec initially planned to build as many as 40 reactors in the province, but the government chose to pursue hydroelectric mega-projects instead (see the James Bay Project). At the end of the 1970s, public opinion about nuclear energy shifted, and only one new reactor at Gentilly was operational by 1983. The same year, another reactor began operation at Point Lepreau, New Brunswick, a province longing to diversify its energy sources since the oil crisis of 1973.
  In 1977, a new plant close to Toronto, Darlington, was approved for completion in 1988 at an estimated cost of $3.9 billion (1978). After much controversy the last unit came into service five years late. By then the cost had ballooned to $14.4 billion (1993). In the wake of this cost, a Darlington B plant was cancelled. At this point, the operating Canadian reactors fleet consisted of eight units at the Pickering site, eight units at the Bruce site, four units at the Darlington site, one unit at Gentilly in Quebec, and one unit at Point Lepreau in New Brunswick for a 14.7 GWₑ net total operational installed capacity.
caption: Gentilly-1 (right) and 2 (left) nuclear reactors.
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