The largest nuclear station on Earth, briefly, in the 1970s
Pickering
When Pickering Nuclear Generating Station came online in the early 1970s, it was the largest nuclear power plant in the world — and it still supplies roughly a tenth of Ontario's electricity today.
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Pickering, the westernmost town in Durham Region, is best known nationally for one piece of infrastructure: a nuclear power station that was, briefly, the largest in the world.
The largest nuclear plant on Earth (early 1970s)
The Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, on the Lake Ontario shore, was Canada's first major commercial nuclear plant and, when Pickering A entered service between 1971 and 1973 with four 515 MW CANDU reactors, the largest nuclear generating station in the world. Pickering B followed, with its four units coming online between 1983 and 1986 — eight reactors in total at peak.
CANDU technology, made in Canada
Pickering used Canada's homegrown CANDU reactor design — a technology developed specifically to run on natural, unenriched uranium, distinct from the enriched-uranium reactors used in most of the world, and a genuine point of Canadian nuclear-engineering pride through the Cold War era.
Still running, still significant
Pickering remains one of the oldest operating nuclear stations in the world and Canada's third-largest by capacity. Its remaining four active units generate roughly 11% of all of Ontario's electricity and employ about 3,000 people — a genuinely load-bearing piece of the province's power grid, operating out of a building that predates most of the housing that now surrounds it.
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Sources
- Ontario Power Generation — Pickering Nuclear Station
- Wikipedia — Pickering Nuclear Generating Station