Lepreau nuclear plant outage to cost at least $140M

A 140-day planned shutdown starting this month at the Point Lepreau nuclear generating station will cost at least $140 million, according to N.B. Power.

CEO Lori Clark said the cost of replacement power during the outage, scheduled for July 14 to Dec. 1, is about $1 million per day.

However, she noted this figure does not represent all costs of the maintenance work to be completed during the shutdown. The CEO declined to share that full budgeted cost when speaking with reporters on Friday.

Clark said she's confident the outage won't last longer than 140 days, despite a maintenance outage last year at Point Lepreau extending 21 weeks longer than planned. 

That unplanned outage ended up costing the utility $200 million, Clark said. The utility is still trying to recoup some of that money through an insurance claim, Clark said

"With many of these outages, they are complex, and we may find some things when we get in there that would impact our ability to come back specifically on a certain day, and we'll deal with those items as they come along."

"We have taken other maintenance outages, annual maintenance outages, at our other stations to prepare, to ensure that they're working and working well, as a contingency for Lepreau." 

Clark said some of the work to be done this year will build on temporary repairs made during the prolonged 2024 outage. She called last year a "trial run" for the work to come. 

"We had to do a generator repair following that incident … we knew, as soon as the material was available, we would need to do a complete generator rewind," she said. 

"The good news is, we've done a lot of this type of work in the 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." 

Clark said the cost of the planned outage was accounted for with the latest rate increase, but unplanned time offline could affect power bills.

"There are other things that would improve the situation, and things that would make this worse," she said, without providing further detail. 

"Looking just at the outage would not make sense in terms of understanding a rate impact, because there's so many other things from a company perspective that go into the rate ask." 

The latest N.B. Power rate increases, approved by the province's Energy and Utilities Board in the spring, are expected to cost the average residential customer about $244 more this year.