The Darlington project is part of that wave. In total, Ontario Power Generation plans to build four units at a cost of $20.9 billion Canadian, and federal and provincial investment funds have since committed up to $3 billion Canadian for minority stakes in the project. In the U.S., the Biden administration backed nuclear power as an anchor for an emissions-free grid, and both Trump administrations have embraced it under the banner of “energy dominance.”
Proponents of SMRs argue that smaller, repeatable designs like the BWRX will be cheaper and faster to build than large-scale reactors. The idea is that mass manufacturing and construction of these reactors will create a sort of learning-curve effect, so even if the first unit is expensive to make, the 100th unit will be far cheaper. But right now, this is only a hypothesis. Just two SMR plants are operating commercially worldwide, in Russia and China, and some in the nuclear industry argue that it’s more economical to stick with big reactors.
Given that the Darlington project is the first attempt at building a BWRX-300, some budget and timeline overruns aren’t surprising. Ontario Power Generation itself said that the update “reflects GE Vernova Hitachi (GEVH) Nuclear Energy’s ongoing engineering for its first-of-a-kind SMR, which has impacts on construction execution and supply chain performance.”
“GE Vernova Hitachi is committed to working closely with Ontario Power Generation (OPG) and our partners to deliver the Western world’s first commercial SMR,” a GE Vernova Hitachi spokesperson told Canary Media in an emailed statement. “While engineering and design maturity are important considerations, as OPG’s update recognizes, there are multiple interconnected contributions across engineering, procurement and construction, as well as evolving market conditions, including inflation and geopolitical risks.”
While overruns are expected for a first-of-its-kind project, their scale matters. If costs or timelines balloon by too much, it could have a chilling effect on the other efforts to develop BWRX-300 reactors. Vogtle offers a cautionary precedent. Even though its second new reactor was 30% cheaper to build than its first, what’s remembered is the project’s enormous overall price tag.
