Another milestone has been passed in the project to restart Units 1 and 2 at the Bruce A generating station.
Bruce Power President and CEO Duncan Hawthorne says the 480th an final calandria tube was removed from the Unit 1 reactor late Wednesday night.
That effectively ends the robotic disassembly phase of the project.
Hawthorne says the tube removal process took less than a month, roughly four times faster than in Unit 2.
Calandria tubes contain pressure tubes which in turn hold the uranium fuel bundles.
Because the tubes are radioactive, their removal required the use of robotic tools by tradespeople working outside the reactor vault using video feeds and computers to manipulate the tools.
Hawthorne says from here the re-build begins but he points out this phase will be far more manual in scope than the robotics used in phase one.
Hawthorne says they hope to have both units operating by 2010.
The new work will start shortly on Unit 2 followed by similar work on Unit 1 about three months later.
Once in operation the units will generate 15 hundred megawatts of electricity, enough to meet the average annual demand of the cities of Ottawa and Hamilton combined.