For over fifteen years, engineers from the New Brunswick Electric Power Commission[note 1] visited AECL's Chalk River Laboratories to keep abreast of the latest trends in the field.
[4] The borrowing capacity was solved by the federal government in January 1974 with the announcement of a loan program covering half the costs of a first nuclear plant in any province in Canada.
In March 1975, Hatfield declared on television that the decision was final, and that the reactor would be built regardless of the ongoing environmental assessment process, in a move described by New Brunswick sociologist Ronald Babin as the "nuclear fait accompli policy".
[4] On 2 May 1975, the Atomic Energy Control Board authorized the construction of two 635-MW reactors on a site designed to host four in Point Lepreau, 20 km west of Saint John, New Brunswick's largest city at the time.
[12] In April 2004, a report[13] authored by former British Energy chairman Robin Jeffrey estimated the plant's refurbishment would cost $1.36 billion instead of the C$935 million figure quoted at the time by the provincial utility.
Jeffrey's report made no recommendations on whether to undertake the plant's overhaul or not but advised New Brunswick decision makers to seek competitive bids for new fossil-fuel fired generation capacity.
[14] Despite being denied a federal grant to fund the project,[15] NB Power announced on 29 July 2005 that it was awarding Atomic Energy of Canada Limited a $1.4 billion (CAD) contract for refurbishing the generating station.
[16] The refurbishment of the power station began on 28 March 2008 and was originally scheduled to last 18 months with AECL as the lead contractor on the project, but the operation was marred by technical glitches, delays and incidents.
[17][18] For instance, two 115-tonne turbine rotors, (not part of the AECL contract) worth C$10 million each, toppled a barge in Saint John Harbour while being transported to the plant on 15 October 2008.
[2] A few weeks later it was announced on 29 October 2009 that the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station would be one of the assets that were to be included in the proposed sale of NB Power to Hydro-Québec.
[24] Graham's announcement was contested by analysts who blamed the collapse of the deal on the difficult political situation in New Brunswick, six months before a scheduled provincial election.
[27][28] On 9 October 2010, NB Power announced that AECL would have to remove all 380 calandria tubes from the reactor and reinstall them a second time, an operation which took a year earlier in the refurbishment program.
According to an internal report dated 30 June 2010, the problem "is likely the result of damage to the tube sheet bores caused by the cleaning operation in a previous work series".
[30][31] First re-connected to the grid on 23 October 2012, on 23 November 2012 Point Lepreau restarted commercial power production with a final refurbishment cost approximately "$1 billion over its original budget".
As indicated on 25 July 2019, NB Power envisions commercial demonstrations of both reactor types at the Point Lepreau site if these advanced technologies successfully complete Phase 2 of the CNSC Vendor Design review and their financial and project planning predictions continue to show promise.
In March 2019, a consortium involving NB Power, the Government of New Brunswick, ARC Nuclear, and Moltex Energy announced plans to develop small modular reactors at the Point Lepreau site.