On common experiences

Even the National Post can't help pointing out the problems encountered by a large number of governments relying on nuclear power:

Globally, half of the 45 reactors currently under construction have encountered construction delays and many are over-budget, according to an analysis recently tabled to the German government. These delays and hefty cost overruns, together with the recession's decreased energy demand, have prompted a closer look at what was just years ago considered the world's favourite energy source.

The Point Lepreau station in New Brunswick -- Atlantic Canada's only nuclear facility and the first CANDU-6 reactor to undergo a complete rebuild -- has been under refurbishment since March 2008 and is now seven months behind schedule. The province is on the hook for roughly $150-million in additional replacement fuel costs, and will rack up another $20 million for every month the project is delayed.

In Finland, a massive power plant touted as the poster child of the nuclear renaissance has been under construction for four years. While the reactor was scheduled for completion this summer, Areva, the French company building it and one of three bidders on Ontario's Darlington project, is now unwilling to predict when it will go online. The reactor, slated to be the biggest in the world with an excavation site the size of 55 football fields, is today roughly 50% over budget.

Russia announced last week that it will rein in construction of new reactors because of the financial downturn and a decline in electricity consumption. Though the government planned to build two units each year over the next several years, it has "corrected" that plan by halving production to one unit per year.

Officials in the U.S. announced in April it would suspend construction of a $6-billion nuclear project in Missouri. Two months later, the country's largest nuclear power generator, Exelon, said it was "ramping back" plans to build a proposed nuclear plant in Texas.

"The industry has predicted that new cheap reactors, in a world searching for silver-bullet solutions to climate change, would revive an industry moribund since Chernobyl," said Shawn-Patrick Stensil, spokesman for Greenpeace Canada, referring to the 1986 nuclear disaster that left an entire Ukraine city uninhabitable. "Ontario's delay shows the industry is failing to deliver on cheap reactors."