Ontario's Darlington Nuclear Station at Half-Capacity for Repairs

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The Darlington Nuclear Power Station, located in Bowmanville, Ontario, near Toronto, is generating at half-capacity due to forced outages at two of its 881-megawatt (MW) units.

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Darlington 01 was forced offline Tuesday morning, after a leaking valve discovered in the containment area of the reactor. Maintenance personnel removed the unit from service to make repairs safely.

Darlington 02 was taken offline during the weekend as a result of the main output transformer grounding, as well as repairs on a leaking fuel line. Plant workers are hoping to have both units back in service within a week.

Darlington workers are planning a vacuum building outage (VBO), which is unique to Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactors. The maintenance is scheduled to take place next spring, when the entire facility will be offline about a month.

State-government-owned Ontario Power Generation (Toronto) owns and operates the Darlington and Pickering nuclear power stations. The two stations have a combined generating capacity of about 6,600 MW.

As one of the largest producers of electricity in North America, Ontario Power Generation operates and maintains 65 hydroelectric and five thermal stations, which along with the nuclear facilities, produce more than 19,000 MW.

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