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Non-nuclear equipment at Lepreau causes another shutdown

Nuclear generation expected to be out for a month, just weeks after 4-month maintenance outage

Less than two weeks after returning from a months-long scheduled maintenance, the Point Lepreau nuclear generating station is off-line again.

Steve Bagshaw, N.B. Power’s chief nuclear officer, said the plant was taken off-line Sunday morning for repairs to a gasket in its turbine system on the non-nuclear side of the plant.

Plant workers first discovered “some steam escaping from a gasket” on Aug. 21 and monitored it.

The utility took a “proactive decision to take the station off-line and replace this leaking gasket,” said Bagshaw, and there was, “no risk to staff, the public, the environment.”

The leaky gasket was discovered as the utility was ramping up the generating power of the plant. Workers were in the process of increasing the power level of the plant to 93 per cent on Friday when they first noticed the leaky gasket.

Lepreau came back online on Aug. 19, after 132 days of maintenance, just under two weeks longer than planned.

Although it took “slightly longer than expected,” Bagshaw said, the planned outage was complex, and involved more than 20,000 tasks.

The latest repair is expected to take until the end of September.

‘Non-nuclear side’ is source of problems

Point Lepreau has been plagued with unplanned and longer than expected outages in the past several years, most of which have to do with the non-nuclear side of the plant, said Bagshaw.

Point Lepreau underwent a four-year-long refurbishment that ended in 2012, but it did not include the non-nuclear side, where heat generated by the nuclear reactor is converted to electricity through a turbine system.

This is the third year in a row that an equipment failure has delayed Lepreau’s return to service following a maintenance outage.

In 2024, the plant spent more than eight months off-line when “a critical issue” related to its main generator was identified at the end of a scheduled maintenance outage, according to a news release.

Then in 2025, Lepreau spent 163 days off-line, mostly in a planned outage, to allow for a “generator rewind” on the non-nuclear side.

A large bearing that failed during procedures to restart the plant added nearly two weeks to that outage.

In February of this year, N.B. Power CEO Lori Clark told reporters that Lepreau would need “in the neighbourhood" or $60 million to $100 million worth of capital investments to “stay top quartile in our production.”

At the utility’s rate hearing in March, N.B. Power executives shared that they plan to spend $88.4 million over three years on outside experts to help fix Lepreau’s chronic reliability problems.

Last fall, the utility hired Laurentis Energy Partners, a subsidiary of Ontario Power Generation, to “provide targeted expertise and operational support” for the plant.

While Lepreau is shut down, the utility relies on energy from its other generation plants, as well as imported electricity, mainly from Quebec.

According to evidence presented at March rate hearings, every day of avoided downtime at Lepreau would save N.B. Power an estimated $1.9 million.

Erica Butler is a reporter with CBC New Brunswick. She lives in Sackville and works out of the Moncton newsroom. You can send story tips to erica.butler@cbc.ca.