Lepreau nuclear plant’s costs will continue to balloon: critic.

But NB Power insists the station should supply safe, reliable electricity for years to come

Telegraph-Journal, John Chilibeck  •  Local Journalism Initiative reporter, Jan 08, 2025

Last year’s costly, prolonged shutdown at the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station near Saint John is just a piece of debilitatingly expensive repairs to come, warns an industry critic.

The outage that lasted between April 6 and Dec. 11 could end up costing New Brunswick ratepayers hundreds of millions.

But Gordon Edwards argues far bigger costs could be coming down the line in the years ahead to the workhorse in NB Power’s fleet of generators that supplies more than one-third of the province’s electricity.

Edwards is the president and co-founder of the nonprofit organization Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and a long-time anti-nuclear activist who testified in 2023 before a New Brunswick legislative committee.

He told Brunswick News in a recent interview that many of the hopes behind the massive $2.5-billion refurbishment of the plant in 2012 turned out to be a fantasy. Now 41 years old, the plant is showing its age, he said.

There are things in the Lepreau reactor that were simply not done that should have been done at the time of the refurbishment. – Gordon Edwards

“The promise was held out that by spending all this money on refurbishment that essentially we’d have a brand new reactor,” Edwards said from his home in Montreal.

“And that’s obviously not true. When you replace a part of a complicated piece of machinery, like an automobile for that matter, often times it causes something else to go wrong because it’s worn but has not been replaced. And there are things in the Lepreau reactor that were simply not done that should have been done at the time of the refurbishment.”

According to a report by New Brunswick’s auditor general in 2014, Lepreau’s refurbishment took 37 months longer and cost $1 billion more than anticipated.

The latest shutdown started on April 6. It was supposed to be a 100-day planned maintenance outage to ensure the ongoing reliability and safety of the station’s operations. However, when workers started to fire up the plant again, they discovered a big problem on the non-nuclear side of the station where none of the maintenance work had been done.

Before the plant could get back up and running, the problem had to be fixed: six damaged stator bars inside the main generator. NB Power described the repair process as complex, requiring careful disassembly, reassembly, and extensive testing to meet strict safety and operational standards.

In the end, it took 149 extra days to get the job done and the plant back online.

No official figures have been released on the extra cost to customers, but earlier in the summer an NB Power official at rate hearings in Fredericton said the repairs would be more than $70 million and the cost of buying power or burning more fossil fuel at other stations to pick up the slack would be on average $900,000 a day.

This raises the possibility that the shutdown cost as much as $294 million.

“NB Power continues to assess the financial impact of the extended outage and is actively exploring options to mitigate costs for customers, including potential recovery through corporate insurance policies,” the public utility stated in a press release on Dec. 12.

Edwards predicts more problems will arise because the refurbishment, now more than a decade old, mostly addressed the plant’s nuclear side, not the conventional one.

“The fact that you have the core of the reactor back up to top operating condition, puts more of a strain on these other components that have not been replaced,” he said. “Among the components that weren’t replaced are the steam generators, which are critical.”

Edwards said the private consortium Bruce Power in Ontario took a different course, replacing steam generators at the first two units at the Bruce nuclear plants on the eastern shore of Lake Huron when they were refurbished in 2012.

“That was a prudent thing to do, but NB Power did not replace them at Lepreau. I predict that will be a source of problems going forward,” said the critic, an octogenarian who has a PhD in mathematics from Queen’s University.

……………………………………………………………………Edwards said another major issue at the plant is the prolonged use of the same hard water, which has different physical properties than regular water. He said the 200,000 litres that circulate in tubes is highly radioactive and should have been replaced long ago.

“To keep the costs from ballooning completely out of proportion, NB Power hasn’t replaced the hard water,” he said. “The cost of hard water is expensive. As much as one-fifth of the cost of a nuclear plant is simply the hard water.”

He and other anti-nuke activists, such as the Sierra Club of Canada, have for years called for the hard water’s replacement, arguing the radioactivity can leak during accidental spills, causing a threat to plant workers and the wider environment.

But NB Power says for the time being, such a drastic step is unnecessary.

“We continue to monitor industry-wide processes and improvements as it relates to the reactor moderator heavy water,” Couture said. “It has not been determined at this time that a replacement of the moderator heavy water is required.”  https://tj.news/new-brunswick/lepreau-nuclear-plants-costs-will-continue-to-balloon-critic#:~:text=No%20official%20figures%20have%20been,slack%20would%20be%20on%20average

January 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Canada | Leave a comment