Proliferation is irrelevant. It was not a Candu reactor what India have used and without Russia's help it's unlikely it would have happened. But there are easier and cheaper pathways - uranium enrichment distributed to be stealthy
It was a heavy water reactor, called CIRUS [1], based on the NRX reactor that later evolved into the CANDU reactor [2].
> But there are easier and cheaper pathways - uranium enrichment distributed to be stealthy
Iran tried that. It is not easy to keep centrifuges stealthy, you need tens of thousands of them, and they need to be organized in cascades, you can't have one here, one there. You need a few hundred here, a few hundred there, and you need conversion and deconversion facilities (of uranium oxide into/from uranium hexafluride). It is virtually impossible to keep such a program secret, the more distributed it is, the more people need to be involved, how do you keep a program secret if there are thousands of people working in those numerous facilities?
I meant it's irrelevant in the context of reactors not in general
It's easier to keep them stealthy vs getting it from a reactor that operates under special conditions where Russia definitely helped, especially under current IAEA rulling
Most dangerous phase of the waste is first ±300y. Afterwards most radiation is low energy and most of the danger would come from ingestion like with any toxic chemical
Your first link to OPG - suggests, when looking at https://www.opg.com/about-us/ - that they have TWO nuclear power stations in their fold, and it's not clear how many of them were refurbished over what time period.
Your second link suggests a refurbishment of ONE power station.
Okay, so not to detract too much from this tiny handful of refurbs - where the assessment, design, build etc were already done, and target state was well understood (it was to get back to whatever parameters and specs they had previously built at the same location), are there any contra-examples of Canadian hubris around budget and schedule on large projects where things might go wrong?
Eglington Crossing light rail - 6 year delay (to 15 year total) with a tripling in cost to $15B - so about $1b per kilometre of light rail.
Peace River hydroelectric - costing double ($16B) original budget.
Vancouver wastewater - a 4x budget creep (to $4B) and a 10y delay so far - it hasn't opened yet.
My point is that it's not only nuclear fission power plants that are grossly underestimated in terms of cost and complexity, but rather, all large infrastructure projects.
Just happens that on top of all that, the estimated numbers for LCoE, payback, clean-up, opex, etc for nuclear fission are also misrepresented (or misunderstood, depending how cynical you are).
