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“We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Ontario Power Generation (OPG) president Nicole Butcher told a news conference Wednesday announcing the Lake Ontario town east of Oshawa has expressed interest in being the host.

The site in Wesleyville has long been owned by OPG and was destined to become an oil-fired power plant until a 1970s oil crisis sent fuel prices skyrocketing and scuttled that plan. It has been sitting idle but is zoned for a power plant and is close to transmission lines, as well as the existing Darlington nuclear plant.

Energy Minister Stephen Lecce said the new plant, if it is built following extensive consultations with Port Hope and the Williams Treaties First Nations, would be equivalent to “two Darlingtons,” making it one of the biggest nuclear generating stations in the world and capable of powering 10 million homes.

While Darlington and the older Pickering nuclear plant east of it use Canada-designed CANDU nuclear technology, no decisions have been made on the type of reactors that could be built on the 1,300-acre Wesleyville site.

Officials at a background briefing on the plan said if all goes well, the first reactor could be operating in the 2040s, although Lecce spoke of a “10-to-15 year time frame.”

Port Hope was the only one of three municipalities that expressed interest in a power plant after the province in late November named sites it owns in Wesleyville, Nanticoke on the north shore of Lake Erie and along the St. Clair River south of Sarnia, as possible locations.

The Nanticoke and Sarnia-area sites were home to massive coal-fired generation stations shut down years ago in the fight against climate change.Ìý

Green Leader Mike Schreiner has called for public hearings on a new energy plan the Ford government is developing in the wake of forecasts that the need for electricity will jump 75 per cent by 2050.Ìý

He wants to see a “competitive procurement process for the lowest-cost, emission-free electricity” instead of automatically choosing nuclear power.

Lecce has said the government is considering “all types of new energy generation” but nuclear is needed as emission-free baseload power.ÌýÌý