Finance committee  The Canadian neutron centre is a revamped version of essentially that project. We have a better conceptual design for it, but it's essentially the same concept. It's a multi-purpose reactor that would service all of the stakeholders in the current NRU facility.

Finance committee  Our best guess for the Canadian neutron centre would be somewhere in the $800 million to a billion dollars, but we can't give you a hard number without actually doing a proper design study, which is the first responsible step. It's goes back to that MAPLE thing, where the number was decided and then the project was built.

Finance committee  The Australians did it, by the way. They brought theirs in under budget and on time.

Finance committee  Maple Leaf was the meat manufacturer that had the whole contamination problem; the reactors were the MAPLE program, just to keep the names right.

Finance committee  I think Maple Leaf has emerged in a better light. The MAPLE program was an attempt to isolate one aspect of NRU's business, which was the molybdenum-99 production, and put it into one place and just do that. It would not have addressed the nuclear engineering side, the research of neutron beams, or any other isotope production issues; it was a single-purpose solution.

Finance committee  It was 10 or 12 years ago. They ran out of money before they finished digging the holes. It was badly underfunded; it was a terrible project.

Finance committee  You can't stockpile molybdenum-99. Its half-life is six days. Half of it's gone after six days. So you cannot stockpile it, which is why you have to have a local domestic production facility. The Australians are just coming online with their facility. Because they're so far from everywhere, they have no choice.

Finance committee  That is correct.

Finance committee  NRU, as it stands, is a large-core reactor in which you can do in-core research to study how materials behave in reactors. If you want to develop new nuclear reactor technology, you have to be able to run materials and fuels and understand how they respond. That's one mission that's done.

Finance committee  I spoke to this very committee two years ago, asking for exactly the same thing. So yes, it's 52 years old. These things always break down eventually. It's obvious.

Finance committee  Well, you lose your isotope supply immediately and then you become beholden to whoever is going to sell it to you. We lose 50 years of leadership in nuclear power. We were the first to build power reactors outside the U.S. We did all the fundamental work on power reactors for the Americans.

Finance committee  Australia built their reactor between the time we first started asking for a new reactor and now, and theirs is operating and we still don't have a replacement. The NRU is down again; it has a leak. It has precipitated yet another isotope crisis, and these are warnings that we need to deal with the problem.