Bruce Power takes unit 5 offline for refurbishment, fourth of six Ontario reactors renewed
Victoria Shinder1 min readBruce Power took unit 5 at its Ontario site off-line on 1 November to begin its Major Component Replacement (MCR) outage. It is the fourth unit refurbished under the company's plan to renew six of the site's eight reactors, and the start of the second half of the privately financed MCR project covering units 3 to 8.
An MCR replaces key reactor components, including steam generators, pressure tubes, calandria tubes and feeder tubes, and adds 30 to 35 years to a reactor's operating life. Bruce 6 was the first, entering its outage in January 2020 and returning to the grid in September 2023. Bruce 3, where robotics were used on a reactor face for the first time, came back online earlier this year more than seven months ahead of schedule. Unit 4 began its outage in February 2025 and is tracking ahead of unit 3.
Unit 7 is scheduled to begin its MCR in 2028 and unit 8 in 2030. Ontario is also evaluating a second refurbishment for units 1 and 2, which returned to service in 2012 after being laid up in the late 1990s. Bruce Power says the programme and site operations sustain 22,000 direct and indirect jobs a year and about CAD 4 billion in annual economic benefit.
"Our performance gets better with each MCR outage," said president and CEO Eric Chassard.
What it means
The schedule is the story: each refurbishment so far has run faster than the one before. For Ontario's grid the trade-off is a large unit out for several years at a time in exchange for decades of extra output from it.