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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
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.
Completely missing the point.
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.
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.
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.
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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