Doug Ford and the politics of wishful thinking

There’s a half-page advert on p. 3 of Saturday’s Globe. The picture shows a clearly delighted Ontario dad plugging in his EV while his young son watches in awe. The text reads; Powering economic growth through clean, affordable nuclear energy. Ontario’s new small modular reactors are creating jobs and will contribute billions to the economy, while providing clean and affordable energy. It’s all happening here. Paid for by the Government of Ontario. This is a project at Darlington that’s been featured in numerous advertisements and press releases for several years now, so I was curious how close that father and son might actually be to plugging into that clean and affordable energy. Turns out not that close. Here’s some good news from a few months ago; First phase of site preparation completed. That only took two years. We’re now heading into the “main” phase of site preparation, which will include excavation and “shoring walls.” In other words, the only jobs created thus far have gone to a handful of heavy equipment operators and the copywriters at Doug’s ad agency! According to Doug’s spin doctors, this revolutionary project will make Ontario a world leader in small modular reactors. Maybe it will, but according to Wikipedia, Russia and China are the only countries that have successfully built SMRs. To my way of thinking, that makes them the world leaders. Here’s a Bloomberg interview with Professor of nuclear engineering Kirk Atkinson at Ontario Tech University. I daresay the interviewer sounds a tad skeptical. In the event everything pans out, we may eventually have a SMR that could power 300,000 homes - or one Google data centre! Given the history of nuclear construction cost over-runs and missed deadlines, the awestruck kid in that ad will be plugging in his own EV by the time that happens. And have you heard about the 70km tunnel under the 401?...