A key part of NB Power’s electricity generation system will be offline for the next several months.
The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station, west of Saint John, will be shut down starting Monday.
Officials at the utility said the generating station is expected to be offline for 140 days, until early December.
A total of 23,000 tasks are planned, including replacing heat transport pump seals, performing motor and pump maintenance, and conducting testing on electrical systems and safety equipment.
“We don’t anticipate any delays with this outage. We do intend to have the plant back by December 1st, going into our heating season period,” Lori Clark, the utility’s president and CEO, told reporters on Friday.
Last year’s planned 100-day maintenance outage ended up taking five months longer than expected after a “critical issue” was found with the main generator when the station was being brought back online.
“Once the initial issue was discovered with a stator bar within the generator, NB Power conducted extensive testing on all stator bars and identified that five others were showing signs of degradation,” the utility said in a news release in October.
“An independent investigation has determined that the cause of this issue is a manufacturer’s defect that occurred during the maintenance of the generator in 2010.”
RELATED: Point Lepreau back in service after months-long outage
This year’s maintenance outage will include a generator rewind, which officials said will involve replacing the stator windings inside the main generator.
“The good news is we’ve done a lot of this type of work in the previous extended part of the 2024 outage, so we are very well prepared for the type of work we need to do to disassemble the generator and put it back together,” said Clark.
The president and CEO also revealed for the first time on Friday that the unplanned portion of last year’s outage cost around $200 million — money the utility is trying to get back.
“We are still proceeding with the insurance claim, so I can’t really speak about anything more about it than that, but definitely in the early days of that,” she said.
As for how much this year’s maintenance will cost, Clark would not provide a specific figure, except to say it will be in the “hundred millions of dollars range.”
We do know the price tag will be at least $140 million — the utility spends about $1 million per day on replacement power when Point Lepreau is offline.
“The replacement power can come from our other facilities, so we do have a number of other facilities where we can do replacement power from,” said Clark.
“We also would buy it on the market. We have a long-term contract with Hydro-Quebec, but we look for the lowest-cost opportunities on the market.”
