Every country announces the world’s largest something roughly once a quarter. Largest solar farm, largest wind farm, largest battery. It’s practically a press-release genre at this point, and most of those projects exist mainly as renderings. Canada’s entry is a little different, because before anyone gets to call it the largest nuclear station on Earth, somebody has to ask the ground for permission.<\/p>\n
That’s what is happening right now on a 1,300-acre field in Port Hope, Ontario, about four miles west of town on the Lake Ontario shoreline. Drill rigs are punching 40 boreholes into the site, some reaching 394 feet (120 meters) down, to find out whether the rock under a place called Wesleyville can carry up to 10,000 megawatts of nuclear reactors. For scale, that is enough to power the equivalent of 10 million homes, and the federal filing says the station would run for 78 years.<\/p>\n
No reactor has been chosen. No construction has been approved. The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada<\/a> lists the New Nuclear at Wesleyville Project as exactly what it is: a proposal, in review, with several reactor technologies still on the table. The 2026 news is happening at the bottom of those boreholes.<\/p>\n Wesleyville is not some farm field OPG picked off a map last year. Ontario Hydro, the predecessor of Ontario Power Generation<\/a>, put up an oil-fired power station there in the 1970s that never generated a watt. The 1979 oil shock and a recession stopped the project cold.<\/p>\n Instead of selling the land, OPG kept it. The site has been maintained and zoned for electricity generation for more than 50 years, sitting next to existing transmission lines, a rail line, highway access and a very large lake full of cooling water. In the utility world, that combination is basically a winning lottery ticket nobody had cashed.<\/p>\n OPG has identified room for nuclear stations on both the eastern and western portions of the property. Which is how you get from a stranded 1970s oil plant to a proposal for the biggest nuclear station humans have ever built.<\/p>\n Some context helps here. The largest operating nuclear plant on Earth is Bruce, on Lake Huron, which is also in Ontario. Bruce runs eight reactors for about 6,400 megawatts and supplies roughly 30 percent of the province’s electricity.<\/p>\n Wesleyville, at full build-out, would beat that by more than half. If you live in upstate New York and want a closer reference, the three reactors near Oswego at Nine Mile Point and FitzPatrick add up to roughly 4,050 megawatts and cover about 2 million homes. Ontario is drilling to see if one field can hold nearly two and a half times that.<\/p>\n The province is not shy about the economics either. The Ontario government<\/a> says the project would support 10,500 jobs across the province, including 1,700 in Port Hope, and add $235 billion Canadian (about $171 billion US) to Ontario’s GDP over its lifespan. “This agreement is an important step forward as we build the world’s largest nuclear station, creating over 10,000 good-paying jobs and reliable power for up to 10 million homes,” said Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s Minister of Energy and Mines, when OPG and Port Hope signed their agreement in February.<\/p>\n One thing about that agreement, though. It’s a memorandum of understanding, and the Municipality of Port Hope<\/a> has been careful to spell out that it is not a host agreement and does not commit the town to hosting anything. A real host community agreement would only get negotiated after the federal impact assessment wraps up. The town took the $4.5 million in readiness funding OPG added this year, on top of an earlier $1 million, and kept its options open.<\/p>\n The drilling itself is the first physical phase of the impact assessment, and it is more involved than it sounds. According to inSauga<\/a>, OPG is working with E.S. Fox, the Indigenous-owned Voyageur Services and other local companies on a geotechnical and hydrogeological borehole campaign covering 40 locations, with depths between 60 and 120 meters, expected to wrap up before summer ends.<\/p>\n The cores that come out of those holes tell engineers what the bedrock can bear, how groundwater moves through it, and whether you can park reactor buildings on it for the better part of a century. E.S. Fox already knows this particular drill. The same contractor handled the offshore geotechnical study for the small modular reactor down the shoreline at Darlington.<\/p>\n Around the rigs, the site is crawling with people counting things. OPG’s field teams are running surveys of vegetation, birds and wildlife, aquatic and surface-water assessments, plus archaeological, socio-economic and traffic studies. The company has also flown drone assessments over the property and set up on-site monitoring equipment.<\/p>\n None of it is glamorous. All of it ends up as evidence in front of a federal review panel, which is why a proposal this size starts with frogs and rock cores instead of concrete.<\/p>\n The regulatory clock started on January 12, 2026, when OPG submitted its Initial Project Description to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada. The agency finished the entire planning phase in 179 of its allotted 180 days, which for a federal regulator is close to showing off.<\/p>\n In April, the project was referred to a review panel, the most rigorous track available, run jointly with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. On July 10, the agency formally commenced the impact assessment and handed OPG its tailored guidelines for the next deliverable.<\/p>\n That next deliverable is the big one. OPG now has a window of up to 1,095 days, three full years, to produce the Impact Statement that lays out every effect this station would have on the water, the land, the fish and the people around it. The public is already engaged, with 894 comments filed on the agency’s registry so far.<\/p>\n And through all of it, the actual machine remains undecided. The federal filing describes capacity of up to 10,000 megawatts and a 78-year operating life, with several reactor technologies under consideration. OPG has floated an in-service date sometime in the 2040s, which tells you how long the runway on a project like this really is.<\/p>\n What makes Wesleyville land differently than the usual megaproject announcement is that Ontario has spent 2026 proving it actually finishes nuclear projects. Down the same stretch of Lake Ontario shoreline, OPG lowered a 1,050-ton foundation slab into a 115-foot shaft<\/a> in April to start the Western world’s first grid-scale small modular reactor, and the 606-ton pressure vessel for that machine<\/a> is taking shape in a factory in Cambridge, Ontario right now.<\/p>\n Add the $12.8 billion Canadian Darlington refurbishment, delivered on budget, and Bruce Power running its own assessment for up to 4,800 new megawatts on Lake Huron, and a pattern emerges. This is a province stacking nuclear projects at every scale at once, from a 300-megawatt module to a 10,000-megawatt field.<\/p>\n Wesleyville is the biggest bet of the lot, and the least certain. The reactors, whichever ones they turn out to be, sit behind years of review, a host agreement that does not exist yet, and a construction decision nobody has made.<\/p>\n The rock gets a vote first. That’s what the 40 holes are for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every country announces the world’s largest something roughly once a quarter. Largest solar farm, largest wind farm, largest battery. It’s … <\/p>\nThe site has been waiting since Jimmy Carter was president<\/h2>\n
Ten thousand megawatts is a genuinely absurd number<\/h2>\n
Forty holes and a lot of frog counting<\/h2>\n
The paperwork is moving faster than the ground<\/h2>\n
Canada is building the small one while drilling for the big one<\/h2>\n