Many MindedOntario's pioneering small reactor will miss its 2030 date and its budget
Ontario Power Generation announced in an earnings release on Tuesday that the first small modular reactor at its Darlington site, east of Toronto, will not be online by its October 2030 target. It will also exceed its CA$7.7 billion budget, about US$5.4 billion. The unit is a GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300, the first small modular reactor under construction in North America.
OPG has not said how large the delay or overrun will be. It expects a revised assessment to be substantially completed by mid-2027. This is the project's second schedule slip: when the design was announced in late 2021, completion was projected as early as 2028. OPG attributed the update to GE Vernova Hitachi's ongoing engineering for a first-of-a-kind design, which has affected construction execution and supply chain performance. The vendor pointed to engineering, procurement and construction factors, plus inflation and geopolitical risks.
The case for small modular reactors rests on factory-style repetition: build many identical units and costs fall. That is still only a hypothesis. Only two such plants operate commercially worldwide, in Russia and China. Darlington is Canada's first new nuclear build in more than three decades, and OPG plans four units there at CA$20.9 billion in total, with federal and provincial investment funds committing up to CA$3 billion for minority stakes. A slipping first unit makes cheap, fast clean power from this route harder to promise. Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Georgia, large AP-1000 reactors, ran seven years and $17 billion over.
To watch: the mid-2027 reassessment, and whether the Tennessee Valley Authority, which received an NRC construction permit for a BWRX-300 in September, and Blue Energy in Texas, which has begun an NRC application, inherit the same problems. Some overruns are normal for a first-of-a-kind project, but the scale will matter.
Source: Canary Media