Natural Resources committee  I honestly don't know. That's a technical issue for the interior of the reactor and the engineers who are working on it, so I really can't speak to that.

Natural Resources committee  I don't fully understand what went wrong in the design and production of the MAPLE reactor. There are MAPLE reactors in Korea that function, so I don't think it's inherent to the design. There is a long history of building research reactors around the world. A new one was just co

Natural Resources committee  I would start by saying that NRC built NRX and NRU, so they have a pretty good track record on this issue of successful reactor projects and a long-term commitment to Canada. The second thing I would say is that the NRC is ideally placed. It has most of the experts it would need

Natural Resources committee  For the short term, I think you're probably looking at McMaster University to fill some gaps, and that's for the next few months while NRU is brought up.... I share the confidence of my colleagues here that the engineers at AECL will be able to bring NRU back into functioning. I

Natural Resources committee  First, to be a little clearer about what has been said, I don't think the Prime Minister said they want to get out of nuclear stuff entirely; they want to get away from the business of subsidizing medical isotope production. I think that's what has been said. I think this is gett

Natural Resources committee  I can quote the number that was quoted in the Senate 18 months ago, which was about $800 million to build a replacement research reactor that would be fully qualified to replace the functionality of NRU. That's a ballpark number. You need to do a proper engineering costing design

Natural Resources committee  I can give one comment. The MAPLE reactors are only isotope production, so they address only part of the mission that is currently undertaken by NRU. If you want to maintain a presence in the nuclear power industry, if you want to be able to do engineering research, if you want

Natural Resources committee  You can't keep the NRU going for much longer. That's for sure. It's old and its maintenance is going up as you keep this thing going. Like an old car, it's going to take more maintenance to keep it going. What we have been proposing is replacing it entirely. You need to build a

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, and thank you for this invitation to appear before you. As you said, I'm a professor of physics and president of the Canadian Institute for Neutron Scattering. This is an organization that represents researchers and students from universities and industries who need

Natural Resources committee  I'm sorry. I will try. Engineering research at NRU has supported Canadian industry, both nuclear and non-nuclear, improving competitiveness and opening new markets to Canadian products. The research facilities at NRU have been used by thousands of Canadian engineers and scientis

Finance committee  I guess the most obvious is that when NRU was built, which is 50 years ago now, the expectation of revenue wasn't there. It was an investment in the future, and the possibilities were then built on as they came along. All of the new stuff that happened in the 50 years that it's b

Finance committee  You have the whole CANDU technology behind it. You have the medical isotopes business, which is providing 20 million treatments a year, a business that we created. You have all the research that goes on. On the neutron beams from Chalk River, we invented two major techniques in n

Finance committee  The $800 million is the construction cost. It will be spread across seven to eight years for the whole project, to bring it up to completion. So it's roughly $100 million a year. It would be small at the beginning while the engineering and design studies are done, and then it wou

Finance committee  The operation from the research side is funded jointly by NRC and NSERC. The reactor itself is run by AECL, so they fund it through that crown corporation.

Finance committee  The AECL facility is a commercial facility run as part of the support for the CANDU program. The research reactor is part of that support. As neutron scanners were passed.... We just use the facilities and we get the neutrons for free. And we're funded by NSERC and NRC to provide