A nuclear power plant was supposed to generate electricity that would be "too cheap to meter'.

Ontario placed its energy bet on that in the late eigthties, leading to a bitter provincial election over the building of the giant Darlington Nuclear Power Plant on the shores of Lake Ontario.

The winner of the election, Liberal David Peterson, seemed to be taking a strong stance against the completion of the multi-billion dollar plant.

Not that Ontario hadn't already been committed to a nuclear future. With the reactors on the Bruce Peninsula, Pickering, among others, the future is already past.

Multi-billion dollar repairs, occasioned by the installation of faulty parts manufactured by Babcock & Wilcox, are only part of the story.

Decommissioning costs, after the hoped for 40 year lifetime, were never included in the original estimates, themselves generously low. Many companies made billions in so-called cost overruns.

Now the costs to put these plants to rest, so-called stranded costs, are being stuck to the taxpayer in Ontario, so Mike Harris and his fashion conscious Tories can privatize these plants at a price cheap enough to attract private sector risk-takers

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