Lepreau refit slowed by air leaks

Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. acknowledges it may not be able to finish the refurbishment of the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor by October as promised due to significant new problems.

"It will be difficult," AECL spokesman Dale Coffin told CBC News on Monday. "There are some challenges we have to overcome."

The project was already expected to be 16 months behind schedule, but AECL has been running into problems remotely inserting 380 new calandria tubes into the reactor.

AECL initially budgeted about six weeks to insert the calandria tubes, but 12 weeks after inserting the first one, the job is less than half done.

Now, new problems have surfaced getting the tubes, which contain pressure rods that hold uranium fuel bundles, to seal air tightly to the calandria wall.

An unspecified number of the attachments have failed air leakage tests and AECL is uncertain about how to fix them.

"I'd rather not get into specifics," said Coffin.

AECL hopes to develop a fix for the leaks and finish the installations by late May, he said. "We will be assessing the schedule as we go."

Ongoing problems

The Lepreau reactor has been undergoing a $1.4 billion rebuild sincethe springof 2008 with the reactor originally scheduled to be back up and running by October 2009.

The AECL portion of the project was supposed to have been completed in July 2009, butthe federal Crown corporationadmitted last fall that its original timeline was flawed.

The revised timeline was supposed to see AECL turn the refurbished reactor back over to NB Power in October 2010 for the final testing and commissioning before the revamped reactor was to start producing power in February 2011.

If AECL is going to meetthat revised October deadline, it will have only five months to complete the remaining one-third of the rebuild.The first two-thirds took two years.

Energy Minister Jack Keir has said that uncertainty over Point Lepreau's future was among the issues that led Hydro-Qubec to demand more concessions in its proposed energy deal with NB Power.

Quebec and New Brunswick broke off negotiations for the $3.2-billion power last month, after five months of intense controversy in New Brunswick.

Under the collapsed deal, Quebec would have taken over the nuclear reactor. But Keir said it was impossible to guarantee to Quebec when it would be producing power again.

The Point Lepreau reactor generates about 30 per cent of New Brunswick's electricity, and the extended shutdown has resulted inan estimated $525 million incost overruns for the province.

The federal and provincial governments have been locked in a war of words over who should cover the costs of the delays, which the New Brunswick government says are the fault of AECL.

The Point Lepreau project is the world's first refurbishment of a Candu-6 facility, and AECL had hoped it would act as a model process that could be sold to other countries that purchased the same kind of reactor.