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‘Perfect storm’ of factors lead U.S scientists to press for medical supplies made at home, not Chalk River
Leaks at an aging Canadian nuclear reactor have highlighted concerns about the global supply of medical isotopes, but solving the problem could mean losing a painful amount of business to the United States.
“The physicians and scientists in the United States are getting antsy about the fact that they’re depending too much on Chalk River in Canada,” said Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine president Jean-Luc Urbain.
They are beginning to wonder whether they can take care of their needs in a more reliable and safer way by producing their own medical isotopes, which are tiny amounts of radioactive substances used in diagnostic tests and cancer treatments.
The noise reached a frenzy in November 2007 when the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission discovered Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. had not actually carried out one of the safety upgrades it said it had in order to renew its licence for the National Research Universal reactor in Chalk River, Ont.
AECL, a Crown corporation, prolonged its maintenance shutdown and the world began running out of isotopes. The medical community was “teetering on the brink of disaster,” as the Ontario Association of Nuclear Medicine described it, and Parliament ended up legislating the reactor back to work. Linda Keen, then president of the nuclear safety commission, ended up fired.
This week it emerged that when the Chalk River reactor had to extend a scheduled outage for a few days last month, for what AECL said at the time were unanticipated technical problems, about 47 kilograms of heavy water had actually leaked into a sump below the reactor and evaporated about four kilograms of radioactive substance into the air.
AECL spokesperson Dale Coffin said another leak that was discovered a couple of years ago in a tank full of ordinary water has grown to the point where it is becoming too expensive to simply replace the water and so it will be repaired during one of the next two regularly scheduled maintenance shutdowns.
Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt has asked her officials to produce a full report on the incident.
Besides the 2007 shutdown and the two recent leaks at the Chalk River reactor, which began operating in 1957, a Dutch reactor has also been out of commission since last August and is not expected to go back online until May.
AECL had planned to build two reactors – Maple 1 and Maple 2 – to replace the Chalk River reactor, but the project was discontinued last May. AECL is currently seeking to extend its licence for the Chalk River reactor past 2011 to 2016, but people in the medical isotope community are concerned about the security of the long-term supply.
There have also been concerns about the highly enriched uranium used by the Chalk River reactor and other major reactors that produce medical isotopes in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and South Africa.
The Washington, D.C.-based National Research Council released a report this month on reconciling non-proliferation policies with the need for a reliable supply of medical isotopes by evaluating the feasibility of converting to low-enriched uranium for the production of molybdenum-99, which decays into the technetium-99m isotope used in 85 per cent of nuclear medicine procedures.
The report recommended the U.S. State Department intensify the diplomatic pressure on countries that still use highly enriched uranium (fuel or targets) to induce them to convert to low-enriched uranium and encourage Canada to live up to its commitment to the minimization of highly enriched uranium. Alan Kuperman, director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program based at the University of Texas, says these factors are a “perfect storm” pushing for U.S. domestic production.
“So you put all this together – the recent disruptions, the fact that these other facilities are so old they’re going to conk out fairly soon, and the fact that these foreign producers are … using bomb-grade uranium … (and) it’s sort of like the perfect storm for policy-making,” Kuperman says. “It makes it very easy to make the case for production in the United States using low-enriched uranium.”
The Missouri University Research Reactor is already hoping to step up as the main competitor to the Chalk River reactor by producing enough molybdenum-99 using low-enriched uranium to supply 50 per cent of U.S. demand. Spokesperson Christian Basi said they could be ready to start by 2012 if their $40 million (U.S.) proposal is approved.
Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Group, Inc., an energy company based in Lynchburg, Va., announced this week an agreement with Dublin-based Covidien, a major supplier of medical isotopes, to develop waste-reducing liquid core reactor technology to produce molybdenum-99 using low-enriched uranium. They also said the program could supply more than half the U.S. demand.
Ottawa-based MDS Nordion Inc., a Covidien competitor, currently supplies 50 per cent of the world’s demand for medical isotopes through a revenue-sharing agreement with AECL. MDS Nordion would not participate in this article because it is in arbitration with AECL over the cancelled Maple reactors. AECL would not comment on federal government policy.
Raitt said securing the supply of isotopes is an important priority for the government.
“I think what we all recognize is that there is no quick or easy solution to guarantee the long-term supply in the globe for medical isotopes,” Raitt said. “Canada is continuing to look at all the potential options, as are other countries and other private- and public- sector parties, because we’re all very much aware of the importance of medical isotopes and … our government is committed to ensuring that we have the isotope supply we need.”
View articleToronto Star 2009