Originally Posted by irv
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Originally Posted by john_pifer
Wow. That's some heavy-duty rebar.
Some of the most crazy stuff you can't see, I think irv posted a picture of one of them before? But there are two tunnels that run out into lake Ontario, one is 800m long and the other is 700m I believe (going by memory here, one might be a bit longer than that), one is the cooling inlet and the other is the outlet diffuser, and there is a great deal of space in between them. These are huge tunnels.
I remember those as well as well as some other pics I can currently find.
Time to get digging to see if I can find them again?
Those pics of the tunnels highlight the key to why both Bruce and Darlington average a higher CF than Pickering, which has shore-level inlets and outlets (Bruce has offshore inlets, shore-level outlets). Darlington was the epitome of CANDU engineering at the time it was constructed, 920MWe units (GROSS) with the same fuel channel count as Bruce, but improved turbine configuration, SG configuration...etc. It was the prototype for the export-ready CANDU 9 (it was the CANDU 900, same thing really) that we (Canada) never successfully sold (quite unlike the C6). Darlington was supposed to host at least 8 units: 2x CANDU 4-packs like Bruce and Pickering but the delays caused by Chernobyl, the economic downturn and skyrocketing interest rates which drove the costs of Darlington A through the roof meant a permanent hold on the 4x B units, which were never constructed as C9's.
Decades later, the plan to build 4x ACR1000's as the B plant was considered, even pursued, with it getting as far as an EA for construction granted, making it shovel-ready. But the Wynne government, on the heels of its predecessor run by McGuilty, had derailed the power generation sector in the province so badly in their pursuit of wind, solar and backup gas that it was infinitely postponed yet again.
Now, it looks like it MAY be constructed using SMR's distilled out of the Federal SMR roadmap. Meanwhile, Pickering managed an 88% Capacity Factor, the best of its life this past year, generating 26.4TWh in 2019, a record for the site. On what could poetically be described as the eve of its demise, old Pickering, the oldest operating group of CANDU's in the world, is performing better now than it ever has. Unit 5 after a maintenance outage is now producing close to 550MWe (NET) on occasion, showing that if refurbished, the old girl has a LOT more in her if she was only allowed to run. Refusing to refurbish Pickering B is a huge mistake, and one Ontario will live to regret, just like the disaster that was the GEA. Another 40 years out of Pickering is on the table with its mid-life refurb, robbing this old girl of that opportunity is an absolute travesty.