OPG's Darlington Unit 3 enters maintenance outage after 492 days of operation

CLARINGTON, ONTARIO - Ontario Power Generation's Darlington Unit 3 was safely shut down recently, beginning an outage that will include inspections and maintenance on a variety of nuclear and non-nuclear systems as part of the station's maintenance cycle.

"Darlington Unit 3 enters this maintenance period after operating for 492 consecutive days," said Gregory Smith, Senior Vice President of the station.

"During that time the Unit produced over 10 TWh of electricity; more than enough to have supplied a city about the size of Oshawa for eight years."

Maintenance scheduled during this seven week outage will focus on the continuous improvement of the station's reliability; inspection and maintenance of feeder piping that is part of the Unit's nuclear heat transport system; and inspection and maintenance of the turbine generator.

"Safety, reliability and performance are the focus of our nuclear program and last year's results at Darlington - the best performing multi-unit Candu station in Canada - complemented the solid performance of Unit 3," said Gregory. "As a station, Darlington produced over 17 per cent of all the electricity consumed in Ontario last year."

Darlington units 1, 2, and 4 are all operating at 100 per cent delivering nearly 2,600 MW of electricity to the Ontario electricity grid.