CDN Forces Reactor Online Against Safety Regulations 338
Socguy writes "The Canadian government has passed legislation that will reopen an Ontario nuclear reactor that produces most of the world's supply of critical medical isotopes, even though the site has been shut down for safety maintenance. Witnesses and experts were called in to the House to face questions about safety concerns and all parties eventually voiced support for the bill, which would effectively suspend CNSC's oversight role for 120 days. The Chalk River reactor ceased operating on Nov. 18. Pressure on the government to restart operations began to build after delays in the shutdown of the government-run site, which generates two-thirds of the world's radioisotopes, began to cause a critical shortage of radioisotopes."
Politics... meh (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Got to love it... (Score:5, Informative)
FTA
Doctors around the world depend on the nuclear material for life-saving diagnostic scans, and imaging for fractures, cancers and heart conditions.
Further, the reactor is owned by Canada, the country. It is not an independent business. Everything you've just said is complete anti-business bullshit.
Re:Asking for disaster? (Score:5, Informative)
And no, this isn't capable of "spectacular" failure for most values of spectacular.
Media hyperbole... (Score:2, Informative)
Anyhoo, they don't really produce a large fraction of the world's supply of isotopes, simply because transporting the stuff all over the place would be extremely wasteful due to the short life thereof - that is pure media hyperbole. It would be true in an Ontario sort of way, where Ontario is regarded as 'the whole world'.
Every major city with a cancer treatment centre has to produce their own isotopes, since even if you would transport the stuff in a military jet it won't get there in time.
Green Party of Canada press release (Score:3, Informative)
Green Party demands inquiry into AECL negligence
OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper should save taxpayers money on the Mulroney-Schreiber inquiry and instead perform a useful inquiry, says the Green Party. The party is calling for a full inquiry into the behaviour of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., focusing on safety concerns arising from AECL's severe lack of accountability, its repeated failures to comply with instructions from its regulator, radioactive dumping practices and other environmental transgressions along with the recent incident at Chalk River, where AECL ignored licensing conditions.
"It is apparent that AECL has become a rogue force and pays no heed to safety instructions from its regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). Mr. Harper must look into this serious situation at once to gain control over AECL," said Green Party leader Elizabeth May. "We urgently need answers. Why was AECL operating the NRU reactor in violation of its license and why did the Harper government allow this to happen?"
The CNSC ordered the installation of a backup power supply system at the Chalk River reactor as a crucial safeguard, yet AECL operated the reactor without the backup system until it was caught red handed last month.
"Canadians also deserve to know why the government was unprepared for the shortage of medical radioisotopes when the Chalk River facility was shut down for routine maintenance. The government saw this coming from a mile away, so why did the Harper government fail to source the isotopes from other reactors? Why is he only now scrambling to do something about the situation? How is it that AECL is years behind schedule and at least $160 million over budget on bringing online the two Maple reactors which could have prevented this shortage?"
Ms. May said the inquiry should also investigate AECL's former practice of dumping thousands of litres of radioactive waste into Chalk River daily.
"We know that AECL continued to dump up to 4,000 litres of radioactive waste a day into Chalk River despite repeated commitments to stop. Furthermore, does AECL have a plan for the decontamination of Chalk River? We demand to know how AECL was allowed to get away with dumping radioactive contaminants into the river and what have been taken to clean up this mess."
In 2003, AECL told the CNSC that the cost of a clean up would be at least $2 billion.
"For too long, the AECL has been permitted to operate as it pleases - defying orders from its regulator, keeping its practices secret and avoiding accountability. Mr. Harper must rein in this rogue force for the safety of all Canadians."
Re:Radio 1 report. (Score:4, Informative)
Rather, the reactor likely produces Mo-99, with a half life of 2.75 days (66 hours). Mo-99 decays into Tc-99m, and the two can be easily separated chemically. Hospitals have a "generator" that contains Mo-99, that continually decays into the useful Tc-99m, which is periodically extracted and used.
Re:I was going to ask... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OK, a show of hands... (Score:1, Informative)
The replacement was to be the two MAPLE reactors at chalk river, each of which supposedly could produce 100 percent of the worlds supply of radio isotopes. They were supposed to be in use years ago.
Re:I was going to ask... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Media hyperbole... (Score:5, Informative)
If you were to consider total medical isotopes by the kilo then true, chalk river is a small player, which is sort of like considering the total amount of fossil fuels used in the world when half the worlds oil production has stopped for 4 months.
If you look at Tc99 production worldwide (in terms of the commericalized amounts) chalk river is somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3rds of production. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less depending on who you ask.
Any sort of functional imaging probably involves Tc99, blood pool organ imaging etc... There are lots of reasons why Tc99 is the choice, but in short, that's what we use, so that's what detectors are designed for so changing to something else is impractical.
The isopotes produced in 'hot labs' at cancer centers etc... are for different kinds of imaging (e.g. PET scans). These can still be done of course, but they aren't the same kind of imaging as Tc99 tends to provide.
In short, yes, they load it on planes and fly it all over north america and Asia, from chalk river.
Re:Blame the regulators (Score:3, Informative)
As it is, it's working fine, and a pump is not a thin red line separating "life goes on" and "catastrophe"--this isn't even a big power reactor.
If both of the main pumps were to go offline, it would be a bad call not to shut down the reactor at that point, but even if they waited for the backup to fail (three pump failures in a row? What are the odds?), it's still possible for them to shut down the reactor and do a controlled release within safety limits if necessary. Hardly the end of the world, or even a town.
The ad says they have two sources (Score:5, Informative)
Let's take a look at the advertising from the company that actually sells the medical isotopes made at Chalk River:
MDS Nordion [nordion.com] is the global leader in the supply and distribution of short-lived medical isotopes. It's what sets us apart.
There's a "Molybdenum-99 Shortage Resource Center" [snm.org] page which has more useful background on the subject. There are about five places in the world that make this stuff, and not much excess capacity.
The U.S. Department of Energy started a project [comcast.net] in 1995 to convert a research reactor at Sandia to medical isotope production. This was done after the last US commercial producer, in Tuxedo, NY, shut down. The Sandia effort was canceled, after it was working and able to produce isotopes, on July 30, 1999, by the Office of Isotope Programs at DOE.
There's a startup that claims they will start making this stuff with a linear accelerator in early 2008, but they sound flakey.
A few corrections. . . (Score:3, Informative)
The Chalk River reactor does supply energy to the power grid. It also makes money from the sale of isotopes; government or not, money matters. The reactor is also 50 years old.
During a routine 5-day maintenance shut-down, it was decided that the reactor needed some new safety features installed designed to protect during natural disasters. It doesn't sound as though there was a fundamental problem of immediate concern. Here is a better article [canada.com] on the subject.
-FL
Re:"world supply" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What a sound idea.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What a sound idea.. (Score:3, Informative)
Ironically the water pump is needed in case of a massive earthquake in a relativley geologically stable area. It's needed to keep the plant operating during and after the earthquake, not to guarantee the plants safety but it's ability to operate. The safety comittee shut them down because they hadn't performed the upgrade they agreed to do and thus were in breach of their licence to operate the reactor.
In other words, they made a mistake on their upgrade schedule and got shut down on a technicality.
Chalk River and President Jimmy Carter (Score:3, Informative)
ttyl
Farrell
Re:I was going to ask... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A few corrections. . . (Score:2, Informative)
No it doesn't. I work at the reactor in question (National Research Universal [wikipedia.org]). The NRU reactor is used for generating isotopes, as a neutron source for neutron scattering experiments, and for nuclear fuel research. But it isn't used to generate electricity. Unless there is an invisible turbine hall around there someplace that I missed,
Hopefully the two MAPLE reactors [wikipedia.org] will be up and running within the next few years, then if NRU shuts down for a long period of time again it won't affect the world's isotope supply.
Re:A few corrections. . . (Score:4, Informative)
I worked in the Canadian nuclear power industry in the late 1970's and in the 1980's, and before that I had a summer job at CRNL (Chalk River) in 1977. I'm pretty sure that NRU has *never* supplied energy to the power grid. There is no turbine there. It has been used for *research* into fuels and technologies that were eventually used in CANDU power reactors, but that's not the same thing.
The very first Canadian reactor to supply energy to the power grid was NPD (Nuclear Power Demonstration) at Rolphton, Ontario, about 30 km upstream of Chalk River. NPD was built about 5 years after NRU, and used to demonstrate the feasibility of using a reactor to produce electricity. It was later used as a Nuclear Training Centre by Ontario Hydro, until it was shut down in the late 1980's.
Re:I was going to ask... (Score:5, Informative)
This was the grandparent's point:
Let's say you have substance A that decays into substance B. Substance A is what you want, and substance B is dangerous in large quantities.
Let's say you introduce 16 mg of substance A into a patient's body. This is what you'll get over time:
Now, let's say that the substance is already half decayed. So, to introduce 16 mg of substance A into the patient's body, you need to introduce 32 mg of the A+B alloy. Then you get:
So to get the same dose of substance A, you've already had to double the dose of substance B.
...
This is what you wrote:
Kind of missing the point, isn't it?
Mod parent way up (Score:1, Informative)
Also to those asking why there aren't two reactors producing these isotopes: there are. Notice the article says NRU only produces 2/3 of the world's supply.
More precisely, NRU was a research reactor built in 1957. As they realized some of the rare isotopes it produced were medically useful, they incrementally increased its output of those isotopes to meet increasing demand, but as it was never a real issue, no one bothered to build a dedicated isotope production facility, they just started extracting them from other sources. As the group in charge of it started to look at shutting down the reactor in the 2005 time frame, they designed the MAPLE reactors to be a replacement. MAPLE 1 and 2 were finished just a couple years ago, but inspections revealed potential for enough sediments to accumulate to reduce the functionallity of the control rod mechanism, so some parts were redesigned and are being retrofitted before the CNSC will let them go online. This will happen next year. In the meantime, they relicensed NRU to run until 2011.
Either of the two MAPLE reactors will be able to supply 100% of the worldwide isotope demand, and will run as backups for each other.