PAVILION | CANADA MEET CANADA’S NUCLEAR SECTOR AT WNE2021
First power The first commercial CANDU reactor entered service on 26 September 1968, at Douglas Point in Ontario. It was closed in 1984.
GOING ITS OWN WAY Canada has been involved in the nuclear industry since it provided uranium for the Manhattan Project and its Chalk River site was the home of the Zero Energy Experimental Pile (ZEEP), a UK-Canada collaboration in 1942. Nuclear power reactors in Canada are CANDU
(Canadian deuterium-uranium) reactors. These pressurised heavy water reactors use natural uranium as fuel and heavy water as a coolant and moderator. The Canadian design has been successfully exported to South Korea, China, Argentina, India, Pakistan and Romania. As CANDU reactors require large amounts of
deuterium oxide (‘heavy water’) the Bruce site was also home to the world’s largest heavy water production plant, which had two plants each producing 800t of deuterium a year at peak production. The first unit was shut down in 1984 and the second in 1997, and that site is now cleared.
OPERATING PLANTS Today, three plants in Ontario (Bruce, Pickering and Darlington) and one in New Brunswick (Point Lepreau) produce about 15 per cent of Canada’s electricity. Five reactors (Pickering 1 and 4, Bruce 1 and 2 and Point Lepreau) have undergone refurbishment. Gentilly 2 in Quebec was recently shut down, and will join Pickering 2 and 3 in a ‘safe storage’. Because CANDU units are refuelled on-load,
they can achieve high capacity factors. In 2021, a new world record for continuous operation without a shutdown was set by Darlington 1 when it operated for 1106 days. Pickering 7 held the record between 1994 and 2016 with a continuous campaign of 894 days.
SMALL MODULAR REACTORS Within the last three years, four provinces have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to develop small modular reactors (SMRs) – and two of the provinces would be hosting nuclear power generation for the first time. In April 2021, Alberta was the most recent signatory to the MOU, joining New Brunswick, Ontario and Saskatchewan. Canada’s interest in SMRs has increased, as plans in the early 2000s for new CANDU units have not come to fruition. A roadmap for SMRs was laid out by Natural
Resources Canada (NRCan), and it was followed up by an action plan in 2020. Ten designs have begun a design review process set in place by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. The Government of Canada awarded a $5.7 million grant to Terrestrial Energy for its Integral Molten Salt Reactor. That design has now moved toward the engineering and design phases. Canada’s interest in SMRs does not stop at
indigenous Canadian designs. Ontario Power Generation plans to build the first SMR at the Darlington site by 2028 and has named GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, X-Energy and Terrestrial Energy as finalists in the competition to supply the unit.
1106 days
LIFE MANAGEMENT The Darlington plant is half way through a major refurbishment that involves re-tubing all four reactor cores. Each of the four 800MWe Darlington CANDU reactors will be taken out of service for around three years for the replacement of fuel channels, feeder pipes, calandria tubes and end fittings. The first of the four units was shut down in 2016 and returned to service in 2020 and a second unit is currently under the refurbishment. The project will run until 2026, involving nearly 12,000 workers at more than 180 companies across Ontario. Once refurbished, the reactors will operate for at least another 30 years. Similar refurbishment is under way at Bruce units 3-8, where the first unit to undergo the extensive work is Bruce 6. That plant began its refurbishment outage in January 2020.
Darlington 1 holds the record for continuous operation
40 | WNE Special Edition |
www.neimagazine.com
HYDROGEN AND NET ZERO Ontario is alert to the possibility of using its investment in nuclear to produce hydrogen – now often seen as a versatile energy vector, likely
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