Bruce Power Increases Nuclear Power Plant Efficiency to Power Ontario at Lower Cost with APM

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Bruce Power operates the world’s largest nuclear generating facility and provides Ontario, Canada with roughly 30% of its electricity. The company’s site in Tiverton, Ontario is home to eight CANDU reactors—each capable of producing up to 800MW.

How to improve efficiency of a nuclear power plant

As it works to balance increasing demand with the costs and safety measures required to support its plant infrastructure, the nuclear power industry is always looking for opportunities to improve efficiency.

Bruce Power identified its scheduled maintenance activities as a source for efficiency gains—enabling increased availability. Specifically, the company had more scheduled maintenance activities than capacity, resulting in delays.  

Using APM to increase the efficiency of nuclear power plants

Bruce Power was able to identify and implement, on a continuous basis, maintenance-related work process improvements through Asset Performance Management (APM) to increase availability without sacrificing nuclear power plant safety. Using  APM, Bruce Power utilized a risk-based approach to determine optimal maintenance intervals for its assets.

By implementing APM, Bruce Power was able to integrate:

• Historical asset health data (mean time between failure, Pareto, and failure analyses)
• Maintenance performance data inspection, calibration, test results
• Current asset health data operator rounds, condition-based monitoring

The company was also able to identify maintenance inefficiencies and readjust its maintenance strategy based on efficiency gains and further reduce the costs of their nuclear power plant operation.

Improved efficiency

APM enabled Bruce Power to continually identify opportunities for maintenance-related work-process improvements to:

• Increase the life of existing assets
• Improve plant reliability and availability
• Increase the amount of power pumped into the grid

In 2014, the company invested over $200 million of private dollars into publicly owned reactors during three planned maintenance outages. These maintenance investment programs helped increase reliability and extend the life of Bruce Power’s units.

One of its units, which provides more than 15% of Ontario’s electricity, surpassed 500 days of continuous operation. As a result, Bruce Power was recognized as the top performing multi-unit CANDU plant in the world by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators.