Pickering's four B units come offline for a refurbishment worth decades
Victoria Shinder2 min readOntario Power Generation has begun its project to refurbish the Pickering nuclear station east of Toronto, which the American Nuclear Society's Nuclear Newswire reports is described as Canada's largest clean energy infrastructure project. The work covers Pickering units 5 to 8 - the Pickering B units - which are to be removed from service by the end of September. Refurbishment itself is expected to start early next year with unit 5, pending final approval from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
The scope is large: 1,520 fuel channels and 48 boilers are to be replaced and a 1.5-kilometre deep-water intake built, extending the four CANDU reactors' operating lives by as much as 38 years. According to OPG, the refurbished station will be able to supply up to 2,200 MW; Pickering currently provides about 14% of Ontario's electricity. A 200,000-square-foot training and mock-up facility is being built for the retube, feeder and boiler work.
More than C$3 billion in contracts have been awarded to Ontario- and Canada-based suppliers. They include about C$1.7 billion to Aecon Group and Candu Energy, an AtkinsRéalis company, for the retube, feeder and boiler replacement at unit 5, and about C$1.3 billion to Aecon and Siemens Energy Canada for turbine generator replacement. The provincial government, which approved the plans last November, frames the project in terms of jobs, supply chain and "economic sovereignty" amid US tariffs, and says it wants to keep 90% of project spending in Canada. The project is also expected to secure a long-term supply of cobalt-60 for medical and sterilisation uses.
What it means
Refurbishment is the least glamorous and most dependable way to add decades of low-carbon capacity: the site, licence, grid connection and workforce already exist. Ontario has done it before at Darlington and Bruce, and those programmes built the supply chain Pickering now draws on.
The near-term effect runs the other way. Four units leaving service at once removes a large block of supply from Ontario's system for the duration of the work, and the province will have to cover that gap while the refurbishment runs. The regulator's final approval for unit 5 is the next milestone.