Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
OTTAWA—There would be no political meltdown over the nuclear shutdown in Chalk River, Ont., if the aging reactor had a backup. The scandal behind the scandal is the $300-million replacements that don’t work properly.
In 1991, Bill MacCallum had a problem. It began on his first day as head of isotope sales for the company now called MDS Nordion (originally Nordion International Inc.).
The source of all the isotopes, the aging NRU reactor at Chalk River, had shut down. The reactor itself was fine, but there was a breakdown of some of the radioactive material inside it.
The new head of sales had nothing to sell—and wouldn’t, it turned out, during six months of cleanup operations.
MacCallum, now retired and living in Ottawa, recalls having many sleepless nights as customers around the world depended on this stream of materials for nuclear medicine.
“What pulled our fat out of the fire was the other reactor, NRX,” MacCallum recalls. It was an ancient machine, completed in 1947, but it worked well enough to keep the isotope supply flowing, with a short interruption.
Still, customers weren’t happy at the unsettled state of affairs. So MacCallum had a photographer shoot pictures of the half-finished new reactor at Chalk River, then called MAPLE-X. He went to a nuclear medicine conference and showed off reassuring pictures, telling people the new reactor would be finished and ready to operate by 1992.
It wasn’t.
It still isn’t.
There are now two MAPLE reactors. Both are complete and capable of running, but neither has permission to enter production from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the same regulatory body that ordered the NRU shut down for November and much of December.
And there’s still no official target date for commissioning them, leaving the task of producing 80 per cent of the world’s nuclear medicine isotopes to a reactor that, though running well, is 50 years old.
MacCallum calls it “the ‘57 Chevy.”
When Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission head Linda Keen ordered the NRU shut down in December until a backup cooling system could be installed, all parties in Parliament voted to have the reactor turned back on so that patients would not be deprived of isotopes.
And when Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn fired Keen last Tuesday, the political firestorm was fanned—all because the NRU has no backup and has not been replaced.
Lunn, the minister responsible for nuclear energy, was himself the subject of calls to resign over the matter. In Victoria Friday, he defended the dismissal of Keen and the government’s handling of nuclear safety and energy. “I stand behind my actions,” said Lunn, MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, adding he could not have forecast what happened.
Target dates for operating the two replacement reactors were 2000 and 2001, though MacCallum insists the original plans were for a much earlier start. The chronically shutdown MAPLE reactors have cost more than $300 million, far higher than their estimated cost at the start of $140 million.
“Right now we’re going through a series of tests that CNSC has asked us to conduct, and we are scheduled to have those completed in the spring,” said Dale Coffin, a spokesman for Atomic Energy of Canada, which owns the reactors.
“The results of those tests will indicate what the path forward and the schedule will be,” Coffin said.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008