In early September, the organization behind Canada’s push for small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) quietly signalled their demise.
In 2016, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories President Mark Leskinski proclaimed that “SMRs can live among the annals of great Canadian innovations.” Ten years later, the organization announced the termination of its two programs to support SMR development.
During the intervening decade [pdf], the companies promoting the 10 SMR designs in Canada had either left the country, lost their proponents, filed for bankruptcy protection, or failed to secure private sector backing for their projects.
An SMR is a nuclear reactor designed to generate 300 megawatts of electricity or less, compared to Canada’s existing CANDU reactors which generate 500 megawatts or more.
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) manages Chalk River, the federal research campus where Canada’s top nuclear researchers conceived and designed the CANDU reactor. All the power reactors operating in Canada are a similar CANDU design, and CANDUs also operate in six other countries. But the last unit to connect to an electric grid in Canada was in 1993, and CANDU exports dried up decades ago.
CNL’s idea for a transition from large CANDU reactors to smaller reactors was an attempt to reenergize a moribund domestic nuclear industry. The concept was to lower the cost of nuclear reactors by making them smaller and building multiple modular units in factories.
The Canadian Nuclear Laboratories president made his bold claim in 2016 about a stellar future for SMRs during a pitch to the federal government for multiple millions of public dollars to transform Chalk River to focus on SMR research.
Since that public money began flowing, Chalk River’s upgrades included the Advanced Nuclear Materials Research Centre for SMR research, still under construction and projected to open in 2028. The cost for the new facility ballooned from $370 million in 2018 to an estimated $1.025 billionin 2025, about half the cost of the overall SMR transformation of the Chalk River site.
The new research centre’s focus is on “advanced” nuclear fuels for SMRs, including plutonium. One of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories’ first research collaborations for SMR fuel was with Moltex, a UK start-up company that had set up in Saint John in 2018. Moltex proposed to use plutonium to fuel an experimental “advanced” SMR it wanted to build at the Point Lepreau nuclear site on the Bay of Fundy.
Moltex lost its proponent in 2025 when New Brunswick Minister of Energy René Legacy told CBC the province was no longer willing to take on the risk of supporting first-of-a-kind experimental SMRs. A second “advanced” SMR slated for the Point Lepreau site also lost government support. At that point, the provincial and federal governments combined had spent nearly $130 million on SMR activities in New Brunswick—funds that could have gone into heat pumps and energy efficiency upgrades to combat energy poverty and cut climate pollution—without attracting private sector interest.
The New Brunswick SMR projects were two of the 10 SMR designs in Canada reviewed in a recent research report by the Fredericton-based Contesting Energy Discourses through Action Research (CEDAR) project. Of the remaining eight, most have decamped to their U.S. home base after attracting no proponent in Canada.
A CNL spokesperson told The Energy Mix the lab “is playing an important role in advancing microreactor technologies for off-grid and remote applications, with multiple, targeted, initiatives under way for federal partners.”
“CNL continues to support SMR development as part of Atomic Energy of Canada’s Federal Nuclear Science & Technology Work Plan,” Senior Communications Officer Lauren Kutchaw wrote in an email. “These research projects span the nuclear fuel cycle, reactor safety and security, materials and chemistry and energy systems analysis. They build the scientific knowledge to support decision-making, and develop the cutting-edge expertise and capabilities that can be leveraged to advance the deployment of both SMRs and Advanced Reactors in Canada and internationally.”
So far, however, only one SMR is under construction here: an American design at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington nuclear site on Lake Ontario.
By March, 2026, the “Darlington New Build” project was still in pre-construction phase yet, had already received the lion’s share of the $4.5 billion in SMR subsidies by federal and provincial governments. In June, the federal and Ontario governments gave $715 million more via a “loan guarantee” to seven First Nations that flowed the funds through to the project. In return, the First Nations have an “equity guarantee” in a future SMR at Darlington, should one ever be built.
Despite the public spending largesse, and after heroic promotional efforts by Ontario Power Generation and the federal and Ontario governments, there are no reports of private investment in the Darlington SMR—not even after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s high-profile Canada Investment Summit last week—and none have been ordered in Canada or elsewhere.
The high price tag per unit, $6.1 billion plus $1.6 billion in associated infrastructure that could be shared with future SMRs on the site, makes Darlington considerably more expensive than alternative sources of electricity generation, and about the same price per megawatt as the most expensive large reactors ever built in the U.S. No doubt the exorbitant cost explains the investor reticence and lack of orders.
In addition to the Darlington SMR’s financing challenges and empty order book, and the abandonment of the “advanced” SMR projects in New Brunswick, the most spectacular SMR failure is a project designed and championed by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories.
In the “Roadmap” that launched Canada’s SMR strategy, CNL was mandated to develop the country’s first SMR, a “micro modular reactor” to be in operation by 2026. The reactor was meant to serve mining and remote communities. CNL put together a consortium of companies to build the SMR at Chalk River and develop “advanced” fuel to keep it running.
However, in February, 2024, the lead company in the consortium, Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear, announced it was scaling back operations, complaining in a media release that “only a subset” of potential customers “have shown the resolve to incorporate advanced reactors in the near term.” Several months later, the company filed for bankruptcy protection [pdf] in the U.S., owing more than US$600,000 to Canada’s nuclear regulator and lesser amounts to many Canadian small businesses.
The same year the SMR project at Chalk River flopped, Alberta oil and gas giant Cenovus Energy abandoned a market study [pdf] of the potential of SMRs for oil sands extraction, finding that: “from a business perspective… SMRs are not economic or commercially feasible at present or in the near future. The capital costs are high, the timelines are long and uncertain, and technology and supply chains lack maturity.”
The Cenovus market research outcome was foreshadowed by academic research published in 2020 which found that the market for SMRs in mining and remote communities was “too small to be viable.”
Despite the failure of its flagship SMR venture, and the death knell for SMRs in Canada overall, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is persisting in its quest to find a market for SMRs. After all, the organization should need at least to attempt to justify the billions in public funding it has spent so far upgrading Chalk River for SMR research.
According to its September media release announcing the demise of its two SMR support programs, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories “is playing an important role in advancing microreactor technologies for off-grid and remote applications, with multiple, targeted, initiatives under way for federal partners.”
Apparently, old SMR ideas never really die. They will only, eventually, fade away.
Susan O’Donnell is lead researcher of the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University and co-author with M.V. Ramana of a March 2026 report on SMRs in Canada that has been downloaded more than 9,000 times. The report will be published in French later this month.
Patrick McAuley 
Susan O'Donnell 
Jess H. Brewer 
Mitchell Beer 
Kenneth Lelek 
Jesse Rince 
Bill Wylie 
Kevin Archibald 
With the lack of private capital for the Darlington SMR, does this mean that project is dead? I’ve not heard any announcement to that effect from either OPG or the Ontario government. Is the Ontario government now planning to proceed with only our taxpayer money?
Hi Patrick. So far all the $$ going into this project has been public funding, $3.025 billion from the feds and $1 billion from Ontario. Plus OPG is contributing considerable “in-kind” labour, etc. In addition, if you live in Ontario you might have noticed a recent increase in electricity rates. Last year Doug Ford changed the rule on how electricity rates are calculated, forcing ratepayers to pay for projects before they are producing electricity. Almost immediately after that change, OPG applied to charge ratepayers for the cost of the Darlington SMR and the upcoming Pickering reactor refurbishments. The Darlington SMR project is not “officially” dead but the chances of building the other three planned SMRs are zero, IMHO. OPG has returned to its previous plans of only building big reactors. We’ll see how far that gets.
Stupid people, stupid government, stupid investors! I wonder how much the first Model T cost before Henry Ford’s assembly line got running.
Thanks, Jess. There are probably a half-dozen back stories to unpack from that comparison, but I’ll just start with one: If Henry Ford had been up against a proven alternative that was already in operation and spreading fast, quicker to deploy, more reliable in an emergency, and already cheaper than the Model T would ever be…I’ll just guess that he would have had the good sense not to invest, either!
I presume you mean ordinary big CANDU reactors, and not “renewables” with the long-term costs buried in government subsidies. If so, I agree; but SMRs do have a role to play off-grid once the factories get built; until then, they are more expensive per megawatt. Everyone wants instant profits; no one wants to cooperate on long-term solutions.
Renewable subsidies have been vanishingly small to what the fossil fuel industry demands and receives every year — and the nuclear industry has been utterly dependent on multiple forms of taxpayer support for nearly a century. if you want a set of technologies that are actively looking to pay their own way while their costs plummet, that means you’re looking for solar, wind, storage, heat pumps, and much more aggressive energy efficiency measures than we’ve seen to date.
Looking at the Darlington SMR, it would be interesting to know what parts are generic and could potentially be built in a factory and which parts will require bespoke technology for each different site. The academic article linked above (by Froese, Kunz and Ramana) quotes the CEO of Westinghouse about their SMR: “Unless you’re going to build 30 to 50 of them, you’re not going to make your money back.” So perhaps if 30 Darlington SMRs were ordered, a factory might be feasible for some of the parts. But since zero have been ordered so far, having 30 ordered seems a long way off.
You forgot to mention Terrestrial who lost Ontario Power contract to GE Hatachi who are 10 years behind d schedule and 4B over budget. Terrestrial is now building reactors in Texas and for the US military.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but CNL is a federally funded research lab, not an industry proponent. A “transition from large CANDU reactors to smaller reactors” was not “CNL’s idea”, nor was it something they ever pushed for. The point of SMRs is to provide an option for smaller communities that don’t need gigawatt scale plants, not to replace large scale power generation.
The federal government tasked them with supporting the industry, including hosting (but not owning or operating) prototypes for private companies on their already-licensed site. The current government has asked CNL not to pursue that anymore and focus on microreactors instead.
Yes, SMRs were overhyped by the industry and venture capital. A large number of developers tried and failed, and the market narrowed. But as you pointed out, two are actively being built in Darlington. Getting private funding was never a concern, OPG is a crown corporation and a public utility. If the BWRX units built there are successful, they will have passed the FOAK barrier and will receive more orders (Saskatchewan has already said this, Alberta is likely to as well). That’s not a death knell of SMRs, that’s how real life engineering and infrastructure projects work.
Hi Jesse. Re CNL: it’s funded by federal money but it’s a consortium of private companies. Currently they are all American companies with links to the nuclear weapons industry. We write about this in our report. CNL was created in 2014 as a division of AECL and CNL was privatized in 2015 (through a so-called go-co contract with the funding flowing through AECL). At the time CNL was privatized, it was run by three nuclear companies with nuclear industry giant SNC Lavalin (now called AtkinsRéalis) as the lead partner. So yes, CNL is the nuclear industry. The next year, in 2016, CNL launched a vision paper for the transformation of Chalk River that put SMRs at the centre. Following that, the federal government funded the nuclear lobby group, Canadian Nuclear Association, to conduct a series of round tables with nuclear industry players to develop a plan to save itself. That effort resulted in the 2018 SMR Roadmap document that launched the SMR strategy. The SMR project at Chalk River that failed spectacularly was entirely CNL’s baby. They put together the consortium to build the reactor – a microreactor, the same kind they are talking about now – and immediately also came up with a linked research project to develop fuel for it. You mentioned two SMRs at Darlington. There’s only one under construction and I’d bet my house there will not be a second one built, let alone all four under the original plan. They need private funding to demonstrate that the private sector is interested and the technology can be commercialized and exported. Saskatchewan has ID’d the Darlington reactor but has not yet made a decision about ordering one and more recently they expanded their interest to large reactors. Alberta is no longer talking about SMRs, they are planning a big reactor project in the Peace River region. Thanks for your interest in nuclear issues, always happy to see comments about this topic.
Why would Alberta build an SMR. Alberta is the only competitive, “energy-only” wholesale electricity market in Canada. Private companies built all the generation, transmission, and distribution. Private companies compete to supply power into a single, unconstrained pool, and transmission is treated as an open-access public utility to guarantee all generators have access to the grid.
Alberta doesn’t have any debt since the generation and transmission investments are made by private companies. Alberta has an abundance of natural gas to power generation and collects royalties from the NG producers.
A nuclear power plant SMR cannot currently compete economically with natural gas power plants in Alberta.
Kineticor built the Cascade 900 MW power plant in Yellowhead County for $1.5 Billion in a 2 year time frame completed in 2024
Kineticor and Pembina Pipeline Corporation have announced a 1800 MW natural gas power plant in Sturgeon County estimated cost $4-5 Billion. Proposed construction start in 2026.
Experts have kind of been saying this for years – these things will only be built as “boutique” reactors and not viable. I feel like we’ve been going on wishful thinking since then, or maybe hoping the power hungry AI dudes would be more interested…. I’d love it to be workable as much as anyone!