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As frigid temperatures approach New Brunswick, the troubled Point Lepreau nuclear generating station missed its expected return-to-service date earlier this week.
According to N.B. Power, an attempt to reconnect Lepreau to the electrical grid following an extended maintenance outage was scuttled by an equipment failure.
“Start up is a complex stage of the return to service,” N.B. Power spokesperson Elizabeth Fraser wrote in an email about why Lepreau remains offline
“During an early sync to the grid, we ran into challenges on the non-nuclear side of the station with a bearing that is being replaced now.”
Lepreau has been down since mid-July for what was supposed to be a 140-day maintenance outage.
The outage was timed to end early this week before the start of New Brunswick’s peak heating season.
An equipment failure during start up has scuttled plans to get the nuclear generating station up and running earlier this week, ahead of wintry weather.
Lepreau is New Brunswick’s most important generating plant and when running is the lowest-cost facility N.B. Power operates.
According to the utility, replacing its output with other sources of electricity costs between $1 million and $4 million per day, with the highest of those prices occurring during cold snaps.
Environment and Climate Change Canada has been forecasting temperatures across New Brunswick to plunge well below freezing later this week, likely adding millions of dollars to the cost of Lepreau’s delayed return.
On Wednesday, N.B. Power’s Coleson Cove generating station was burning oil to generate power to meet some of the demand normally supplied by Lepreau.
In her email, Fraser said other than the current problem reconnecting Lepreau to the electrical grid, the 20-week shutdown went well with 23,000 individual tasks “completed successfully.”
N.B. Power is in the midst of a multi-year effort to upgrade aging components at the nuclear plant in the hopes of fixing chronic reliability problems.
Earlier this year, Duncan Hawthorne, a former nuclear executive with Bruce Power in Ontario who is among a group reviewing the future of N.B. Power for the Holt government, called Lepreau “the poorest-performing nuclear plant in North America.”
Since returning from refurbishment in 2012, Lepreau has been offline for more than 1,240 days for a variety of expected and unexpected maintenance issues.
That is 790 more days offline than were originally projected for the renovated plant after 14 years.
Fraser declined to give a specific date for when Lepreau might be back online, only saying it would be “later in December.”
