Why Canada Is Quietly Becoming a Nuclear Powerhouse
While the world debates nuclear energy, Canada is actually building it.
If you want to understand where nuclear energy is headed in the West, stop watching the United States argue about it and start watching Canada do it. On May 8, 2025, Ontario Power Generation and the province of Ontario gave the formal green light to construct the first commercial small modular reactor in any G7 country at the Darlington site northeast of Toronto. No more feasibility studies. No more consultations. Shovels are going in the ground.
That is a bigger deal than most people outside the nuclear world appreciate. Russia and China have already built SMRs. Every other developed nation is still drawing up blueprints and forming working groups. Canada, quietly and methodically, just started building one. ⚛️
A country that never really stopped being nuclear
Canada’s nuclear story doesn’t begin with SMRs. It begins decades ago with the CANDU reactor, a uniquely Canadian invention that uses heavy water as a moderator and runs on natural, unenriched uranium. That last part matters: CANDU reactors can bypass the uranium enrichment step entirely, which is an elegantly Canadian solution to a geopolitically messy supply chain.
Today, Canada operates 17 CANDU reactors in Ontario and New Brunswick, and has exported the technology to countries including India, Romania, Argentina, South Korea, and China. The nation’s five nuclear power stations carry a combined capacity of 13,545 megawatts. 🔬 Nuclear isn’t a new experiment here; it’s infrastructure that has been quietly generating clean electricity for generations.
On the fuel side, Canada is just as dominant. According to Natural Resources Canada, the country produced 14.3 kilotonnes of uranium in 2024, all from high-grade deposits in Saskatchewan where concentrations can run up to 100 times the global average. About 90% of that was exported to power reactors around the world. Cameco, headquartered in Saskatoon, operates the only uranium conversion facility in Canada and controls roughly 20% of global conversion capacity. Canada isn’t just building reactors. It sits upstream in the global nuclear fuel chain too.
What this means is that Canada doesn’t have to build nuclear credibility from scratch. It already has the regulators, the engineers, the supply chains, and the public familiarity. The SMR push is less a leap of faith and more a logical next chapter.
Canada ranks second globally in uranium production
70,000+ Canadians work across the nuclear supply chain
The CANDU design has been exported to six countries
Cameco operates about one-fifth of the Western world’s uranium conversion capacity 🌍
Saskatchewan’s uranium deposits are among the highest-grade on Earth
The Darlington project: what’s actually being built
The Darlington New Nuclear Project is Ontario Power Generation’s plan to deploy four GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 small modular reactors at an existing nuclear site on the shore of Lake Ontario. The total budget is CAD 20.9 billion (roughly USD 15 billion), with the first unit alone priced at CAD 6.1 billion. ⚡
The BWRX-300 is a 300-megawatt water-cooled reactor with passive safety systems, meaning it can cool itself without human intervention or backup power in an emergency. Each unit takes up roughly the footprint of a football field and will power approximately 300,000 homes when running. Four units together hit 1,200 megawatts, enough for over a million homes and enough to make a real dent in Ontario’s looming electricity crunch.
That crunch is very real. According to Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator, electricity demand in Ontario is forecast to grow by a staggering 75% by 2050, driven by electrification, electric vehicles, and data centers. The grid needs new firm, dispatchable power, the kind that runs around the clock regardless of whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. SMRs fit that description neatly. 💡
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission issued the construction licence on April 4, 2025, and Ontario’s Minister of Energy, Stephen Lecce, noted that 80% of the project’s total spending will flow to Ontario companies and skilled workers. The province has also signed export agreements worth more than CAD 1 billion with companies in Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic, where Canadian workers will build and operate reactors.
That’s the part people miss when they talk about Canadian nuclear. This isn’t just about keeping Ontario’s lights on. Canada is positioning itself as a first-mover in SMR deployment and then selling that experience abroad. If you build the first one, you know things no one else does yet.
Do you think Canada’s SMR bet will pay off commercially, or is this primarily a domestic energy story? The answer probably shapes how you read everything that follows.
From one province to a national strategy
Ontario is the flagship, but the nuclear push spreads well beyond Darlington. According to the World Nuclear Association, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Alberta have all signed an interprovincial agreement for SMR development. SaskPower is assessing the BWRX-300 design for a potential facility near Estevan, Saskatchewan, and has created a new subsidiary, SaskNuclear Inc., specifically to lead regulatory and business development work.
Alberta signed a memorandum of understanding with the federal government in November 2025 to develop policy frameworks for nuclear deployment. Early-stage development work has begun on projects like Energy Alberta’s Peace River Nuclear Power Project. And in January 2026, the University of Regina announced a new SMR Safety, Licensing, and Testing Centre backed by CAD 6 million in federal and provincial funding. 🌱
The federal government isn’t sitting on its hands either. Ottawa announced CAD 2 billion in funding for the Darlington project in October 2025 and has channeled an additional CAD 13.6 million through Natural Resources Canada’s Enabling SMRs program for nine research projects, covering everything from fuel dry storage to Indigenous-owned manufacturing supply chains.
Ontario: Darlington under construction, four BWRX-300 units planned through the 2030s
Saskatchewan: SaskPower assessing SMR deployment near Estevan; new SaskNuclear Inc. subsidiary
Alberta: Federal-provincial MOU signed November 2025; Peace River project in early development
New Brunswick: More complicated, with NB Power signaling a potential move away from SMRs in 2025
That last point deserves a mention. New Brunswick’s ARC-100 project at Point Lepreau completed Phase 2 of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s pre-licensing review in July 2025 with no fundamental barriers to licensing. But NB Power has raised doubts about whether they’ll proceed. The picture is not uniformly rosy.
The honest complications
Let’s not pretend this is all easy. SMRs built in the Western world have no commercial precedents. The cost estimates for Darlington have attracted serious skepticism, including from the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, which has argued that the project’s electricity will cost far more per unit than wind power. That criticism isn’t wrong, exactly. Nuclear electricity is typically expensive per kilowatt-hour, and SMRs, because they’re smaller, don’t benefit from the economies of scale that make large reactors cheaper on a per-megawatt basis. Early estimates suggest capital costs per unit of production for SMRs could run 70% higher than traditional large reactors, according to the Canada Energy Regulator. ⚡
There is also a fuel supply wrinkle that Canada hasn’t fully solved. CANDU reactors run beautifully on natural uranium, which Canada has in abundance. But the BWRX-300 and most other SMR designs require enriched uranium, and Canada has no enrichment facilities. For the Darlington project, OPG has signed agreements to source uranium from Cameco, enrich it in the US and France, and fabricate the fuel in the US before shipping it back to Canada. That works, but it introduces supply chain dependencies that the CANDU fleet was specifically designed to avoid.
Whether this matters in practice is a fair debate. The US and European enrichment capacity that Canada will rely on is politically allied and relatively stable. Still, it’s worth being clear-eyed about: Canada’s SMR program trades its old self-sufficiency in fuel for dependence on international partners, at least until domestic enrichment becomes economically viable. 🔬
What’s your honest assessment of those trade-offs? The Darlington project will be a critical data point for every country watching.
What the rest of the world is waiting for
The global SMR market is projected to be worth between $150 billion and $300 billion by 2040, according to Natural Resources Canada. Countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Sweden are all exploring BWRX-300 deployment specifically. The reason they’re watching Darlington so closely is simple: before Canada, no one in the developed world had actually built one commercially. 📈
As GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik put it when the project was approved, successful deployment at Darlington will demonstrate feasibility in a way that no amount of modeling or political commitment can. OPG’s experience will become a benchmark. The engineering problems that get solved, the regulatory lessons learned, and the cost trajectory of the second, third, and fourth units will all become reference data for utilities and governments everywhere else.
Ontario’s Minister Lecce has been blunt about the export ambitions. The province’s CAD 1 billion in agreements with Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic aren’t charity. They’re early-mover commercial plays in what could be a massive market. If the BWRX-300 works at Darlington, Canadian companies will have the project history and operator experience that no competitor in the West can yet claim.
The BWRX-300 is also being considered by the US, UK, Poland, and Sweden
OPG’s experience will serve as the benchmark for other utilities globally
Each reactor is expected to operate for 65 years once commissioned
Ontario’s four-SMR project could boost provincial GDP by CAD 13.7 billion and support roughly 2,000 jobs annually, per OPG projections
The global SMR market could reach $150–$300 billion by 2040 🚀
Canada built CANDU reactors when the rest of the world thought differently about nuclear. It’s doing something similar now, with smaller reactors, higher ambitions, and a much bigger audience watching. Whether the economics pan out exactly as projected, whether the schedule holds, whether other provinces follow Ontario — those are genuine open questions. But the question of whether Canada is taking nuclear seriously enough to actually build something? That one’s been answered.
The real question now is whether the Darlington project comes in on time and budget. Because if it does, the age of commercial SMRs in the West doesn’t begin in London or Washington. It begins in a small town on the north shore of Lake Ontario.