A Different Kind of Reactor
For decades, Canada's nuclear industry has run on a point of national pride: the Candu reactor, designed to use natural, unenriched uranium sourced and processed entirely within Canada. That made the country's nuclear power supply chain almost entirely self-sufficient, insulated from the geopolitics of global uranium enrichment.
That era is ending. Ontario is now building small modular reactors (SMRs) at the Darlington site, and other provinces are exploring similar projects. Unlike Candu reactors, most SMR designs require enriched uranium — fuel that has to be processed at specialized facilities that, for now, don't exist in Canada at commercial scale.
Why the Shift Matters
The move to SMRs is meant to help Canada meet growing electricity demand and climate targets with smaller, faster-to-build reactors than traditional large-scale nuclear plants. But it comes with a tradeoff: enrichment and fuel fabrication for these reactors currently depend on facilities in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere.
That's a significant departure from the self-reliance that has defined Canadian nuclear policy since the Candu program began. Canada has long been one of the world's top uranium producers, mining the raw material domestically. But mining raw uranium and enriching it into reactor-ready fuel are very different processes — and Canada has never built out serious enrichment capacity domestically, largely because Candu technology never needed it.
The Energy Security Question
With SMRs now moving from blueprints to construction at Darlington, energy planners are grappling with what it means to depend on other countries for a critical piece of the nuclear fuel cycle. Supply chains for enriched uranium have already faced strain in recent years amid shifting global politics, including sanctions affecting Russian enrichment capacity, historically one of the world's largest suppliers.
Proponents of the SMR push argue the benefits — lower construction costs, modular scalability, and a path to replace aging power infrastructure — outweigh the new reliance on imported fuel. Critics counter that trading energy independence for speed and cost savings could leave Canada exposed if international supply chains tighten.
What's Next
As Ontario's SMR projects progress, the question of whether Canada should invest in its own uranium enrichment capacity is likely to become a bigger part of the national conversation. Building that capacity domestically would be costly and take years, but it would restore the kind of self-sufficiency that defined the Candu era.
For now, Canada's nuclear future is taking shape with a new dependency baked in — one that didn't exist for the reactors that powered the country for the last half-century.
Source: CBC News
