Point Lepreau operating at reduced capacity

New Brunswick's trouble-plagued Point Lepreau nuclear station is being forced to operate at reduced power for several weeks as NB Power scrambles to find spare parts to deal with another breakdown in the plant's non-nuclear equipment.

"We are confident this is just a small problem," said NB Power President Gaetan Thomas earlyMonday."These are normal in the first few years of a restart."

NB Power announcedin a newsrelease May 28 it was taking Lepreau offline "to facilitate testing and analysis of the turbine system," but those tests turned up problems in one of two "reheaters" that cannot be immediately fixed.

Lepreau quietly went back onlineFridayevening after an eight-day evaluation of the problem but can now operate at only between 75 per centand 85 per centpower until replacement parts are acquired.Lepreau will then have to be shut down again for those parts to be installed, according to Thomas.

"It could be a few weeks from now four to six weeks.We need to obviously get some spares and plan the outage effectively so we don't know yet at this stage when that will be."

It's the plant's second shutdown in the last three months and one of several since it came back online from a $1.4 billion,four-and-a-half-year renovation in November 2012.

NB Power had originally budgeted 117 days of lost production to unexpected events and ongoingmaintenanceatLepreau during its first three and a half years of operation to the end of March 2016.Instead, a series of problemshas led to over 220 lost days.Running at reduced power for several weeks and then shutting down to repair the reheater will add significantly to that total.

Nuclear critic Chris Rouse of the Canadian energy watchdog group New Clear Free Solutionssays although the reactor was refurbished, the rest of the plant was not and that is causing more problems than NB Power expected.

We got a 30- or 35-year-old plant and we can't expect it to operate like a new one.- Chris Rouse, New Clear Free Soluctions energy watchdog group

"We didn't get a new plant.We got a 30- or 35-year-old plant and we can't expect it to operate like a new one,"said Rouse, who is a registered intervenor in NB Power's upcoming rate hearing before the Energy and Utilities Board.

"I don't see it getting any better."

Thomas does acknowledge there areagingproblems with Lepreau's non-nuclear generating equipment.

"It was the conventional plant that was not refurbished.We will continue to invest over the next few years to bring it up to par," he said.

NB Power begins a rate hearing in front of the Energy and Utilities Board next week and has asked for a 2 per centincrease to meet its financial targets.But those targets were partly based on Lepreau operating at 96 per centefficiency this year, a level it cannot reach.

NB Power says every day of lost production at Lepreau costs about $1 million but has previously announced it will not be asking for a higher rate increase because of Lepreau's problems.