NB Power admits a decade of underinvestment left its nuclear plant unreliable

Testifying at a New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board rate hearing in March 2026, NB Power senior vice-president Darren Murphy conceded what a decade of Point Lepreau's disappointing output had suggested: the utility had not run the plant well on its own. 'We have not adequately invested in the non-nuclear side of Lepreau since refurbishment,' he said — the reactor emerged from its refurbishment in 2012.

The plant's three worst production years since have all occurred after 2020. That directly contradicted the utility's own 2020 rate-hearing testimony that performance troubles had largely been dealt with and that 'the performance has paid off as a result.'

The bill for the gap is concrete. In December, an unexpected 15-day outage at Lepreau forced NB Power's oil-burning Coleson Cove generating station into service, costing $56 million in replacement energy. CFO Justin Urquhart told the board that if the nuclear plant had been offline for seven days during the late-January cold snap, the incremental cost of fuel and purchased power would have been approximately $67 million — more than $9 million a day.

Murphy, who has testified for years about plans to fix Lepreau's reliability that kept ending in disappointment, said 'trying something different' now made sense: spending more on the plant and bringing in outside nuclear experts to supervise operations. 'What we know for sure is that we have not been able to do it on our own up until now,' he said.

$56M for one December outage; a seven-day outage in the January cold snap would have cost about $67M ($9M+ a day); rates now rising 4.75%

The utility skimped on the non-nuclear side of the plant for over a decade after refurbishment — by its own senior vice-president's admission.

Management repeatedly declared the problem solved: 2020's assurance that better days were ahead was followed by the three worst years on record.

Depending on a single nuclear plant for supply turned any outage into a nine-million-dollar-a-day exposure during winter peak.

The operation had to hand supervision to outside nuclear experts because the in-house team could not deliver reliability alone.

Underinvestment hides until the asset fails at the worst moment: deferred maintenance on one critical plant converts into rate hikes and $9M-a-day exposure.

NB Power is asking the EUB to approve a 4.75% rate increase worth an additional $90.4 million in revenue, part of which would be poured into Lepreau's reliability and outside expert supervision. Murphy said the utility believes it has 'identified and are closing some of the historical performance gaps.'