Rejuvenated Lepreau to operate uninterrupted through next two winters

NB Power's shaky finances may have quietly firmed up last week with the restart of the Point Lepreau nuclear generating station and plans to keep it running without interruption through the next two winters for the first time since its troubled refurbishment.

"Beginning in 2016 the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station placed a renewed focus on equipment reliability to ensure more predictable operations," said an NB Power statement issued Monday about its plans to run Lepreau without stopping until April of 2022.

"These measures have proven successful."

Lepreau was supposed to operate in two-year stretches between maintenance outages following its four-year, $2.4-billion refurbishment, which ended in 2012.  Instead, significant performance problems required costly shutdowns for repairs and upgrades for the last eight years in a row.  

However, following its latest 62-day outage, which ended last Thursday, the utility believes the plant is finally in good enough condition to operate uninterrupted for up to 22 months at a time. That development could hold the key to  undoing the utility's significant debt-related financial problems.   

"(The) Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station is transitioning to a two-year (outage) cycle based on equipment reliability gains made at the station over the past five years," said the statement.

Good news for province

The province, which owns NB Power and guarantees its debt, is welcoming the news.

"We are encouraged by the leadership of NB Power and the results they have achieved," said Nick Brown, a spokesperson for the Department of Natural Resources and Energy, on Monday.

"Point Lepreau has been improving its operations and reliability since its refurbishment."

Lepreau is NB Power's most important generating station.  Every hour of production at the plant adds an estimated $50,000 to the utility's bottom line.  

Being able to skip an outage next spring will add between 500 and 1,000 hours of production over what the plant has generated in any year since its renovation.

That's worth between $25 million and $50 million in extra annual income to NB Power, which it needs to help cope with its $4.9 billion debt.

To date, Lepreau had not been helping much in those efforts.

In eight years since returning from refurbishment, the nuclear plant has suffered 5,634 more hours of down time for maintenance and repair than originally expected, according to documents filed with the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board in 2013 on that issue.  

$500M spent on capital improvements

On top of disappointing production numbers, NB Power has also had to spend more than $500 million on capital improvements at Lepreau, in part to try to improve its spotty post-refurbishment reliability.

"Unfortunately it did not perform as we would have liked coming out of refurbishment," NB Power vice-president and chief financial officer Darren Murphy said of Lepreau at hearings earlier this year.

"However, past performance is not a good indicator of future performance for Point Lepreau. … We have made some significant investment. The performance has paid off as a result."

Lepreau has undeniably improved its reliability.  It ran for 310 consecutive days for the first time in a quarter century between May 2018 and April 2019, and then had an even longer run of 417 consecutive days between July 2019 and September this year.

That has plant managers convinced Lepreau is ready to operate for two years at a time between outages, boosting the plant's production and income until its projected retirement in 2040.