Leonard seeks funds for Point Lepreau mistakes

Energy Minister Craig Leonard says New Brunswick should be compensated for the knowledge Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. gleaned from the problematic Point Lepreau refurbishment project.

AECL recently completed a refurbishment project at its Wolsong reactor in South Korea in 839 days.

The Point Lepreau refurbishment project started a year before the Wolsong project commenced. And after more than 1,260 days, the New Brunswick reactor is still offline.

The Point Lepreau reactor is not anticipated to be generating electricity in the fall of 2012, well past its original September 2009 deadline.

The province’s energy minister said AECL should compensate the New Brunswick government for the knowledge that the company took from the problems in the Point Lepreau refurbishment.

"The value in AECL is that knowledge they picked up at Point Lepreau and as a result of that New Brunswickers should be compensated for it," Leonard said.

When former premier Bernard Lord announced the Point Lepreau refurbishment in 2005, it was set to be the world’s first Candu-6 reactor to be refurbished and returned to service. At the time, it was anticipated that the knowledge from the refurbishment would allow AECL to undertake the process on other reactors.

Instead, the Wolsong reactor now has the title of being the first reactor to be successfully refurbished. AECL admitted in a July news release that the Wolsong project went so smoothly, in part, because of the problems the company encountered in other projects.

"AECL ramped up its capabilities in Wolsong, applying lessons learned from other retube projects, and ultimately proving the future commercial viability of the Candu retube business," said Hugh MacDiarmid, AECL’s president and chief executive officer, in a July 27 news release.

Critical error

The critical error made by AECL in the refurbishment project was the installation of the reactor’s calandria tubes.

All 380 new tubes were inserted in the reactor between December 2009 and April 2010. But dozens of the tubes flunked air tightness tests after being fused with special inserts designed to hold them in place.

The calandria tubes — made to house smaller nuclear pressure tubes, which in turn contain radioactive nuclear fuel bundles — were the first major pieces of equipment to be installed in the reactor as part of the refurbishment. The tubes are approximately six metres long and 13 centimetres in diameter.

Last year, Gaetan Thomas, the president and chief executive officer of NB Power, said NB Power agreed to the installation of the ill-fitting tubes but blamed AECL for recommending it.

That decision ended up costing the Point Lepreau project a year of lost time, a mistake that was avoided at the Wolsong reactor.

The New Brunswick government is demanding financial compensation for the cost overruns associated with the delays at the reactor.

The refurbishment was supposed to cost $1.4 billion but the delay is anticipated to cost an additional $1 billion in fuel costs.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has repeatedly said the federal government would only pay the penalties outlined in the refurbishment agreements.

The federal and provincial governments agreed to revised contracts in 2005 that outlined what costs would be covered in the event of any delays.