Plant will continue to operate until 2020 before being decommissioned

PICKERING — Members of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station’s Community Advisory Council had a slew of questions for Ontario Power Generation officials at their first meeting after the announcement that the Pickering B reactors would not be refurbished.

The decision not to refurbish the Pickering B reactors was announced earlier this month. This means the Pickering A reactors will be shut down as well, said Paul Pasquet, senior vice-president for Pickering B, and the plant will be decommissioned in 2020.

“When Pickering B shuts down, Pickering A will shut down as well and the rationale for that is the two stations are highly connected … without the B units it’s not economical to run the A units,” Mr. Pasquet explained.

Committee members, who meet monthly, wanted to know why OPG is choosing not to refurbish the four reactors while refurbishing reactors at Darlington.

“There are two factors, one is the scope of the work at Pickering B was larger than Darlington,” said Mr. Pasquet.

The Pickering station is older than Darlington so Darlington’s design makes it easier to refurbish. Another factor is that the Darlington units are larger and cheaper to run on a dollars-per-megawatt basis.

“Darlington is operating very well. The performance of the units was very good.”

Mr. Pasquet stressed that the decision was strictly economic and not related to safety at either plant.

OPG will invest $300 million in Pickering to operate the units four years beyond their expected life span. The two units that were set to go offline in 2014 will now last until 2018 and the other two units will last until 2020.

There were a number of questions OPG couldn’t answer such as what would happen to the hydro towers built along a corridor from the plant, what kind of financial implications the closure would have for the City of Pickering, which collects property tax from OPG, and what would happen with all the workers.

Mr. Pasquet said there are job opportunities with decommissioning the plant as well as the refurbishment at Darlington. He could not comment on the potential new build at Darlington because the provincial government has put that process on hold. As well, some workers will retire in that 10-year time span and the human resources department would make hiring decisions over the next decade based on the planned closure.

“There are a lot of questions to be answered over the next 10 years or so; many of those answers are not available now,” said Don Terry, manager of public affairs at OPG. “The announcement is unlike the announcement businesses make (like) ‘we’re closing our doors now’…. it’s a long time and we have lots of time to answer these questions.”

“The site’s not going to disappear overnight,” added Mr. Pasquet.

Mr. Terry also said that OPG’s involvement in the Ajax-Pickering community, such as the work it does with local charities, will continue.