In December 2020, NRCan released its SMR action plan, which responds to the 53 recommendations in the SMR Roadmap and lays out the steps for the development, demonstration and deployment of SMRs at home and abroad. CNL aims to have a new SMR at its Chalk River site by 2026. Also, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) invited expressions of interest resulting in almost 20 proposals for siting an SMR at a CNL-managed site. Along with this, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) has a pre-licensing vendor design review process to assess nuclear power plant designs based on the vendor's reactor technology – for about ten small reactors with a wide range of capacities up to 300 MWe. In December 2019 the provinces of New Brunswick and Saskatchewan agreed to collaborate with Ontario in advancing the development and deployment of SMRs to address climate change, regional energy demand, economic development, and research and innovation opportunities. In 2018 Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) issued its SMR Roadmap, a plan for nuclear technology development based on SMRs. The second development relates to international leadership regarding small modular reactors (SMRs). The first Bruce unit to undergo refurbishment was unit 6, which started its outage in January 2020 and was restarted in August 2023. The second unit at Darlington, unit 3, was returned to commercial operation in July 2023. The first unit at Darlington, unit 2, started its refurbishment outage in October 2016, and was returned to commercial operation in June 2020. This C$26 billion 15-year programme is one of the largest clean energy projects in North America.
In recent years there have been two notable developments in Canada's nuclear situation: the first based on the 2015 Ontario decision to approve refurbishment (lifetime extension) of the four nuclear units at Darlington and the remaining six units at Bruce (the first two units were already refurbished). A study for the Canadian Nuclear Association and the Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries estimated that in 2019 the Canadian nuclear industry created 76,000 jobs, 16,000 more than in 2012.
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