Pickering Nuclear Power Station completing Refurbishment for Summer Market

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Provincial owned generating electric utility, Ontario Power Generation (OPG) (Toronto, Ontario) is in the process of preparing its 542-megawatt (MW) Unit 4A for service by the end of the second quarter of 2003, to help meet the summer market demand. The Pickering A Station took all four units out of service in December 1997 to work on improving their performance, reliability, and safety.

The Pickering A Station is comprised of four CANDU Heavy Water Nuclear Reactors each with (3) Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) Boilers that produce 6.46 million pounds per hour of 2800 psig @ 485F to drive the four Parsons 542 MW steam turbine/generator sets.

The first phase of this project was to rehabilitate the common support equipment and Unit 4A. The first phase is almost complete which included replacing all the admiralty brass tubes on the condensers for all A units and refurbishment of Unit 4A. The old condensers were corroding and putting copper in the surrounding water table.

The first phase cost will be approximately $1.25 billion. Once the first phase is complete OPG will determine if the other units can be done for $300-400 million each or about another $900 million to $1.2 billion for the additional 1,626 MW. This cost will still be cheaper than natural gas or coal fired units due to the operating fuel costs being so much cheaper.

OPG was one of the spin offs from the old Ontario Hydro Corporation at the end of 1998. They have about 12,000 personnel. OPG with over 70 generating facilities producing close to 25,000 MW directly or indirectly services over 3.9 million customers and is interconnected with the New York, Michigan, Quebec, Manitoba and Minnesota markets.