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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."
...why they couldn't have stockpiled their products before the shutdown, but then realized that the half-lives for the sort of thing they're offering are probably measured in days or hours, right?
... how many people were abso-freaking-lutely SHOCKED to learn that there was no "backup"? There's a WTF if there ever was one.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
... when business takes priority to safety especially at a nuclear reactor. Sounds to me like there is a need for more alternate sites to provide these radio-isotopes to the rest of the world. I bet the places that produce the other 1/3 are making a fortune right now due to supply/demand.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Even if nothing goes wrong, they've set a dangerous precedent of basically telling their watchdog group "Well, we'll let you do your thing, but even though we know little about the engineering behind a reactor, we are also going to basically feel free to disregard you and tell you to suck it if we don't like what you say."
A spectacular idea. Why aren't we, maybe, wondering how we ended up with only ONE reactor that can produce this stuff in the first place?
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
you rush her into the car, strap on the seatbelt, and start heading towards the hospital. on the way there, the "check engine" maintenance light comes on
do you:
1. stop the car, and call for an ambulance
2. drive on, ignoring the light
i think we all know what the obvious answer is
folks: people could die without these radioisotopes. additionally, the safety issue is probably something extremely circumspect
please, no more scolding lectures about safety first, the canadian government did the right thing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Personally, I have to agree with the forced reopening of the reactor. It sounds terrifying, and it's a disgrace that we're in this situation, but the risk is very minimal. The story has been playing in the media here in Canada for a few days now.
This is not a large-scale power generating reactor. It's a relatively small "research" reactor and it is more or less middle of nowhere.
From what I recall from the news stories, the current hold up is the backup power to the second pump is offline. The backup power to the first pump is online, and only one pump needs to be operating at any one time. The truly disgraceful thing is that the plant has been improperly operating without any proper backup power lines for months and months. The current unexpectedly long shut-down occurred because the improper backup systems were discovered by the regulators during a shorter planned down time.
On the flip side, critical medical scans are being canceled by the thousands across North and South America. You can't point at any specific case, but given the large number of procedures being delayed, I'd bet that someone out there is going to die on a daily basis because a scan is postponed.
These things happen.
Through Googling earlier today I saw there was a facility in the Netherlands (link has information about the moly and technetium cows they ship to hospitals.) I also saw mention elsewhere that Australia wasn't affected by the isotope shortage as they get theirs from South Africa. I expect there may be other facilities around the world producing these isotopes in limited quantities but none on the scale of the Canadian reactor.
I expect that these facilities and any others are doing what they can to help mitigate the shortage but I expect that they're limited in what they can do. I doubt one can just suddenly double or triple one's production of radioisotopes if one isn't set up to do so. You'd require more molybdenum, more packaging, more work to package, more paperwork, more personnel. You'd have to coordinate shipping outside your normal channels of distribution, etc.
Likely true. I saw that there is another reactor being built (presumably for this purpose) in Canada that is behind schedule. I didn't look into this much as I was only looking for information about the isotopes themselves. The political reasons why this particular reactor isn't completed were not what I was interested in.
Gotta love it, behind door number 1:
Leave the reactor closed, definitely kill people.
Behind door number 2: Violate safety regs on a reactor, possibly kill people.
Politics is definitely a game more fun to play from the bleachers. For what it's worth, I live in the country and I agree this is the best of a bad situation.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
24 hours in a day / 6 hours in a half-life = 4 half-lifes in a day.
..., which isn't quite an infinite summation but close enough for our rounding. The infinite summation is 2 and the real summation is just under 2 by an incredibly small fraction. That means you need twice as much as the number I calculated.
4 months @ approx. 30 days / month * 4 half-lifes per day = 480 half-lifes.
So, just to supply the one 6-hour period 6 months later, you would need 2^480 times as much material as you would need producing it right then. That's 3.1 × 10^144. The number of atoms in the Universe is often estimated at between 4 × 10^78 and 6 × 10^79. Conservatively, that's 5.2 × 10^64 times more atoms than are contained in the entire Universe.
Of course, you also need enough for the time period before, and the time period before that. Each time you need half as much. This amounts to a summation of 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8
Now, that said, others mentioned that it's probably "stored" and "shipped" as Mo-99, which has 66 hours' of half-life. This, of course, changes everything. In that case you only have to deal with about 44 half-lifes, or 1.4 × 10^13. Which is a hell of a lot less. To get one gram of material to ship at the end of this process (there will be less than a gram on arrival at the destination!) you only need 445000 Kg, or 445 tonnes, or a million pounds. Seriously, a million lbs. For one gram at the end. If you want one gram every 66 hours, you need two million lbs of the stuff. The compared to the fact that at constant rate production, you really only need 44 grams.
All of this math was brought to you so that I could point out that the gp was hilarious and you totally got whooshed. That, or I totally got whooshed by your dry irony trap. But I'm pretty sure it is you who are the whooshed.
folks: people could die without these radioisotopes
And people could die in a nuclear accident.
i think we all know what the obvious answer is
That's because you're no worse off calling the ambulance from your broken down car on the highway as you would be from home.
please, no more scolding lectures about safety first, the canadian government did the right thing
No, they did not, because this action will make it even harder to convince communities to permit nuclear facilities to be located near them.
And you only say that because you've been brainwashed into thinking that nuclear power is more dangerous than fossil fuel power.
Stupid Russians aside (and trust me, Chernobyl wasn't an accident--it was the direct, foreseeable result of extreme stupidity. Quick analogy: Its crappy design made it the Pinto of nuclear reactors, and then the operators in charge basically went around slamming on their brakes randomly until they got rear-ended and the fucking thing blew up), pollution from fossil fuels (including--*gasp!*--radioactive pollution) outweighs pollution from nuclear power by many orders of magnitudes. People die every day due to the direct effects of using fossil fuels (and this isn't a snide criticism of Iraq, though that argument could certainly be made as well.) They explode. And cause cancer and respiratory illness. And then there's the whole greenhouse gas thing. Three mile island, on the other hand, dumped enough radiation into the area that they calculated there is a 50% chance that one extra person died from cancer. Eventually. Years later.
You see, what people fail to grasp is how utterly surrounded they are by radiation. Have you ever watched television on anything other than a flat screen? If so, you've been staring directly into a cathode ray tube. Wanna know what a CRT really is? A particle accelerator. It's beaming beta radiation (and some side-effect X-Rays as well) directly into your eyes. They actually have to add lead to the glass in TV sets to prevent the radiation from reaching harmful levels. I am not making this shit up; every day, millions (if not billions) of knee-jerk anti-nuclear hippies sit around for hours and stare directly into a particle accelerator. (Yes, you can argue that the power levels and leaded glass makes it a pretty safe activity, but that's PRECISELY my point. Just because radiation is involved doesn't mean something is inherently dangerous. Radiation is a danger like high current electricity or poisonous chemicals are a danger. We're surrounded by all three, all of the time, yet sane design renders these things fairly safe.)
And, of course, almost everyone will (at least a couple times in their lives) suffer a radiation burn--more commonly known as a "sunburn". Many people suffer these radiation burns repeatedly, even though they (like all radiation exposures) cause cancer, and even though they're fairly trivial to avoid.
I'm not arguing that we should have a cavalier attitude towards nuclear power--just a little sanity and appropriateness. I don't know the specifics in this case, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the safety requirements were minor and/or highly redundant. Personally, I'd rather we get decent air filters put on our coal-burning plants first. They're far more of a threat to our well-being.