OTTAWA — With Canada’s biggest-ever nuclear construction program in the works, the country’s two nuclear-reactor powerhouses are fighting for the first victory in a battle that could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Canada has not put a new large nuclear reactor into service since 1993, when the last one at the Darlington station east of Toronto went online. But now Ontario is seeking to build up to 4,800 megawatts of new capacity at the Bruce Nuclear Generation Station, and the federal government is backing it.

That’s likely to be the first of a wave of new construction that Gary Rose, the executive vice-president for Canadian nuclear business at AtkinsRéalis, figures could lead to 25 new large reactors and many times more small modular reactors in Canada over the next 20 years.

Ontario alone has forecast a need for about 17,800 more megawatts of nuclear power by 2050 to feed industry, growing population and electrified transportation.

“This is going to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, to do that type of infrastructure build,” Rose said in an interview.

Furthermore, a successful first project might lead to all the rest of the business. “I think building 25 [of the same type] will be cheaper than building 25 different technologies,” Rose said. 

AtkinsRéalis, the renamed SNC-Lavalin, has the rights to the storied Candu technology—the Canadian-designed reactors powering all of the country’s large nuclear stations today. With 18 operable Candu reactors in Ontario and one in New Brunswick, for a long time AtkinsRéalis would have been the favourite to build more.

But another domestic contender has emerged: Westinghouse Electric Co. Named for the American popularizer of alternating-current technology, Westinghouse Electric fell into Canadian hands in 2018, when Brookfield bought it from Toshiba. It boasts that its technology is the foundation for about half the world’s 430 nuclear power reactors.

A transaction that closed last fall moved Westinghouse’s control to a partnership of Brookfield and Saskatchewan’s Cameco, which mines uranium.

This gives Canada good options, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said in a news conference in February, talking about using the proceeds of federal green bonds to support new nuclear projects.

Between AtkinsRéalis and Westinghouse, “we basically have access to half of the installed base in the world, so there is a lot of opportunity,” he said.

Westinghouse didn’t respond to requests for an interview, but it’s advertising a reactor called the AP1000, which it says can pump out 1,110 megawatts of electricity, about 230 megawatts more than the most powerful reactors in service in Canada today.

Five AP1000s are operating: Four in China and one that came online in the U.S. last year.

Westinghouse commissioned consulting firm PwC for an economic impact study concluding that a 4,800-megawatt project using AP1000s—the exact scale of the plans for Ontario’s Bruce site—would add about $28.7 billion to Canada’s gross domestic product. If Westinghouse builds up a Canadian supply chain for AP1000 reactors, PwC estimated, each international sale could mean $880 million for the Canadian economy.

AtkinsRéalis is offering a new 1,000-megawatt Candu model it calls the Monark that is yet to be built; the company unveiled the design just last November.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG), a provincial utility that runs all the large reactors in Ontario except for the ones at the Bruce facility, has also publicized that it’s having “exploratory discussions” with the French electricity utility EDF, on what it would take to build its reactors here.

Where Westinghouse has its glowing economic-impact study, AtkinsRéalis has a public-relations campaign it calls “Canadians for Candu,” spearheaded by former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien and former Progressive Conservative Ontario premier Mike Harris.

Chrétien is a longtime Candu supporter who helped sell the reactors to China, said Rose, while Harris “played a pivotal role in Ontario with the fleet of Ontario reactors that are here and the transition off coal.” (Much of that transition was carried out by Harris’s successor Dalton McGuinty, but Harris’s government began the process.) Both are being paid for their efforts.

AtkinsRéalis has been steadily adding names of supporters. Some are longtime business associates like Aecon and Kinectrics; others include the First Nations Power Authority and the Millwright Regional Council union. The point, said Rose, is to emphasize AtkinsRéalis’s Canadian supply chain. Nobody has built a new Candu reactor here in a while, but multibillion-dollar refurbishments have kept the domestic sector going.

Rose himself is part of the companies’ fight to be first: he joined AtkinsRéalis last June after more than 35 years at OPG. His last post there was vice-president of new nuclear growth, where he oversaw the early planning for new small reactors at Darlington.

Both Westinghouse’s and AtkinsRéalis’s public efforts have been accompanied by more private ones.

Ontario lobbying records show Westinghouse hired John Barrett—a former CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Association and chair of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—to open doors for it at Queen’s Park. Barrett has also lobbied for Westinghouse with officials at Natural Resources Canada and Champagne’s chief of staff Ian Foucher this year.

In March, Westinghouse’s Pittsburgh-based CEO, Patrick Fragman, had a sit-down meeting with Champagne, according to a short briefing note that the minister’s department prepared for him.

The Monark needs a sales job, Rose allows. “The initial conversations I had with federal and provincial leaders was, ‘Oh, I thought Candu was old technology,’” he said.

AtkinsRéalis’s nuclear-power business is just one division in a diversified engineering company, which makes its lobbying activities harder to decode, but it’s approached some of the same Natural Resources officials; the deputy ministers of finance and industry; and a deputy secretary to the federal cabinet for clean growth—all to talk about energy issues, all in 2024.

Also on the list: Canada Infrastructure Bank CEO Ehren Cory. He told The Logic that helping finance large nuclear builds is “very much in our potential scope” and the bank has been talking to multiple provincial utilities about it.

AtkinsRéalis has lobbied the Ontario government, as well, including through longtime government-relations maven and sometime Ontario PC candidate and party strategist Kevin Gaudet.

There’s plenty of work to go around, said Rose. The IAEA keeps revising its forecasts of global demand for nuclear power upward. But AtkinsRéalis wants Canada’s.

“I’m not here to suggest that Westinghouse technology isn’t going to be needed in the world,” he said. “If the IAEA is correct, we’re talking about 1,000 reactors. Although I’d love to have the opportunity to build 1,000 Candus, I’ll take 100. That’s a good start.”