This little gem was in the Ottawa Citizen today. Welcome to the future. Expect to see more of these kinds of stories as nuclear reactors all over the world that were built in the 70's start crapping out. Brown-outs may become a luxury - rationed electricity the norm. Saturday 18 October 1997 Hydro shuts down reactor Utility scrambles to revive two reactors at crippled Bruce station Tom Spears The Ottawa Citizen <Picture>The entire Bruce A station is to be mothballed next year. A reactor at the giant Bruce A nuclear station died prematurely yesterday, as Ontario Hydro gave up trying to repair internal cracks and rust. The fate of two others at the station is still in question. The fourth was shut down two years ago, needing hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs. As the Citizen reported this week, newly discovered corrosion and cracking inside three reactors at the Bruce A station on Lake Huron has interfered with Hydro's plans to run the reactors until spring. They were to be shut down then because of poor performance. Instead they were shut down temporarily, pending repairs. Yesterday Hydro announced its Unit 1 reactor at Bruce will be shut down indefinitely, which was not to have happened before next spring. Hydro is now throwing its efforts into resurrecting the two remaining reactors at Bruce A, which is near the town of Kincardine. It said yesterday it will try to re-start one in November and the other in December. The entire Bruce A station and the four-reactor Pickering A station east of Toronto are to be shut down indefinitely next year. But Hydro badly needs them to get through this winter, when the demand for electricity is highest. Two-thirds of Ontario's electricity comes from nuclear plants. And each Bruce reactor can supply the entire city of Ottawa on the coldest day of winter. Hydro was surprised this summer to find corrosion that caused tubes to crack in the boilers attached to the Unit 1. The reactor itself is not damaged, but the tubes carry radioactive water from the reactor into the boilers, where cracks could release radiation. It checked Units 3 and 4 and found the same problem there, though it has not progressed as far. (Unit 2, the station's only other reactor, has been closed for two years because it needs repairs worth hundreds of millions of dollars). This week the Atomic Energy Control Board of Canada said Hydro still doesn't know enough about the problem to justify re-starting the reactors. "The nature of the defects and the inspection technique may make it difficult for Ontario Hydro to make a timely case for short-term operation of any Bruce A units," the board's safety experts wrote. The board controls nuclear safety in Canada, and reactors can't run without its permission. Yesterday, Hydro said it plans to find out what's wrong fast. "Due to the limited availability of boiler tube inspection equipment and analytical staff between now and the end of the year, Ontario Hydro has focused these critical resources on Units 3 and 4 at Bruce A and Unit 6 at Bruce B," an announcement from Bruce vice-president Jim Ryder said. In a printed announcement he said Hydro "has a high level of confidence in successfully re-starting" Units 3 and 4 in the next two months. The problem is two-fold. First, the job of inspecting boilers is huge. Each reactor has eight boilers more than two storeys high. Each boiler has thousands of tubes, arranged in bundles, to carry radioactive hot water. And the trouble seems to be affecting tubes at the centres of the bundles. "It's a very nasty place to inspect. It's high (in) radioactivity, and physically difficult to reach," said Tom Adams of Energy Probe, a Hydro critic. Probe predicted a week ago that corrosion and cracks could keep the reactors shut down permanently. The inspections are so difficult that in the three months since it found the trouble, Hydro has only checked 45 per cent of Unit 1's boiler tubes. In fact, the boilers had already undergone three months of inspection before the corrosion and cracking were even discovered. The second problem is that the type of corrosion is new. It appears corrosion slightly deforms the metal tubes, which subjects them to stress, which makes them susceptible to more corrosion, Mr. Adams said. Mr. Adams said it's possible that Ontario may face electricity shortages this winter if Hydro is fails to save the two remaining reactor units and the whole Bruce A station remains shut down.
