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As frigid temperatures approach New Brunswick, the troubled Point Lepreau nuclear power plant missed its planned return to service date earlier this week.
According to NB Power, an attempt to reconnect Lepreau to the power grid after a prolonged maintenance outage was thwarted by an equipment failure.
“Commissioning is a complex stage of the return to service,” NB Power spokesperson Elizabeth Fraser wrote in an email about why Lepreau remains offline.
“During an early synchronization with the grid, we ran into challenges on the non-nuclear side of the station with a bearing that is now being replaced.”
Lepreau has been down since mid-July for what was supposed to be a 140-day maintenance outage.
The blackout was scheduled to end earlier this week, before the start of New Brunswick’s peak heating season.
An equipment failure during startup has scuppered plans to bring the nuclear generating station online earlier this week, ahead of winter weather.
Lepreau is New Brunswick’s largest generating plant and, when operational, is the lowest-cost facility operated by NB Power.
According to the utility, replacing its production with other sources of electricity costs between $1 million and $4 million per day, with the highest prices occurring during cold snaps.
Environment and Climate Change Canada has forecast that temperatures across New Brunswick will fall well below freezing later this week, likely adding millions of dollars to the cost of Lepreau’s delayed return.
On Wednesday, NB Power’s Coleson Cove generating station was burning oil to generate power to meet some of the demand normally supplied by Lepreau.
In his email, Fraser said that, apart from the current problem reconnecting Lepreau to the power grid, the 20-week shutdown went well with 23,000 individual tasks “successfully completed.”
NB Power is in the midst of a multi-year effort to upgrade the nuclear plant’s aging components in hopes of fixing chronic reliability issues.
Earlier this year, Duncan Hawthorne, a former Bruce Power nuclear executive in Ontario who is part of a group reviewing the future of NB Power for the Holt government, called Lepreau “the worst performing nuclear plant in North America.”
Since returning from a remodel in 2012, Lepreau has been offline for more than 1,240 days due to a variety of expected and unexpected maintenance issues.
This represents 790 more days of downtime than originally planned for the plant renovated after 14 years.
Fraser declined to give a specific date for when Lepreau might be back online, saying only that it would be “later in December.”
