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CDN Forces Reactor Online Against Safety Regulations
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."
I've done a lot of work out at chalk river with neutron diffraction, and talking to some of the people there apparently a lot of the "issues" are petty little things like signage for hot pipes, etc. The largest issue is back up generators for 2 key pumps, but in reality there are back up pumps with seperate power supplies that could take over in a worst case senario (not likely though). It all appears to be political gesturing as usual but unfortunately this time peoples lives are truly at stake. But then again considering the previous actions of the liberal party i'm truly not that suprised, just saddened that a grab for political power is so negatively affecting peoples lives world wide
drunk chemists
Did you even read the article? The isotopes this reactor produces are for medical purposes.
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.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
This is a small reactor (ie, not a power reactor), way the hell in the middle of nowhere north of Ottawa. It's upstream from Camp Petawawa (large and mostly empty Cdn Forces base), which itself is way out in the boonies.
And no, this isn't capable of "spectacular" failure for most values of spectacular.
-- Alastair
It is not a maintenance requirement. It is a modification request to a plant that has been in operation for many years already. The mod will be done eventually, but they have been ordered to do it with minimal disruption.
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.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
12.12.2007
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."
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
The reactor doesn't produce Tc-99m directly for medical imaging. This would be nearly useless anywhere except at the site of the reactor, due to decay during the time it would take to ship with only a 6 hour half life.
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.
The stuff produced at Chalk River Laboratories is Technetium-99m. Its half-life for gamma emission is 6.01 hours. Pray tell, how do you stockpile?
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.
Well, first the TWO working pumps have to fail, and then the backup has to fail, and by that time I would think they'd shut down the reactor.
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.
Let's take a look at the advertising from the company that actually sells the medical isotopes made at Chalk River:
MDS Nordion 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" 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 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.
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 on the subject.
-FL
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Just to add to the your point. It's a backup water pump that wasn't in the original design of the plant, there was an agreement to a schedule about 10 years ago to install a backup water pump, however, as often happens someone got the schedule screwed up and thought the pump was supposed to be installed for December 2008 instead of 2007. The reactor's only been running for 50 years without the backup pump because it's not critical to operational safety. If the main water pump goes down, the control rods slam shut and the reactor goes offline hard and fast.
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.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Former US President Jimmy Carter has been to the reactor site in question in the 1950s...Canada had their "3 Mile Island" in 1952 when the NRX Reactor at Chalk River had a partial core meltdown. At the time, Carter was a nuclear engineer with the US Navy, and had been training at Chalk River. After the explosion caused either by hydrogen gas, or steam, he was one of the 150 US servicemen who helped clean up the reactor.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Wait, does this mean we have to meta moderate the moderator managers now?
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:
Ha ha, that was good, it's going to decay in your body anyways.Kind of missing the point, isn't it?
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Why do some of the best comments get missed by the moderators? There's a lot of people throwing a fit based on misguided perceptions.
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.