Natural Resources committee  I'm probably not in a great position to explain in detail what Tyne has been doing in that area. They are another spinoff company that came out of AECL. They've been able to carve out a niche capability where they're providing those sorts of technologies to the industry. I wouldn

Natural Resources committee  There are a number of companies that specialize in neutron radiography techniques, which is what's used in the aerospace industry to inspect things like metallic castings and welds. I'm not sure whether they've been applied to the shipbuilding industry previously. Certainly those

Natural Resources committee  In terms of tracking the movement of material, yes, there's a number of techniques. There are active tracking techniques, where people will attach radiation detection devices typically connected to secure wireless networks that will allow you to trace a shipment of material and e

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for your question. Our company designs and builds various radiation detection products. The FlexSpec backpack is one of them. It is a portable device that fits into an innocuous-looking backpack and runs off a smartphone. Law enforcement users will typically wear this—

Natural Resources committee  Well, it connects to a smartphone to provide the user interface. There's a small single-board computer that runs inside the device and does all the heavy lifting for computation. Law enforcement personnel will wear this system. They will often be doing this in a plainclothes sce

Natural Resources committee  Sure. Without going into specific customers, there are law enforcement agencies across North America, in Europe, and in Asia that use this sort of equipment. It's becoming increasingly prevalent. The United States tends to be an early adopter of this type of technology. They hav

Natural Resources committee  Thanks for the question, Cheryl. When we speak about the technology valley of death, we're talking about the gap that exists between funding that supports research and then somehow bridging that to actually exploiting commercial value out of the technology: bringing it to market

Natural Resources committee  We've used the SR and ED program for many, many years. As a small company, we're somewhat unusual because we started our company doing a lot of work in defence and space research. We developed expertise in navigating government forms and applications fairly early in the company's

Natural Resources committee  Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to discuss the future of the nuclear sector. In the course of your study, you have already heard from many of our colleagues in the nuclear sector. You've heard about how nuclear power provides 15

Industry committee  We haven't had any recent collaborations with AECL in that regard. A lot of the focus of R and D at AECL in recent years has been more on nuclear reactor technologies and supporting technologies. Our field of research has moved more towards defence and security applications, so t

Industry committee  It's certainly a concern for a small company when it recognizes that once it has obtained a patent, if a large organization wishes to infringe or create a lot of obstacles for it and wants to throw enough money at doing that, it could tie the small company up in court for a long

Industry committee  The two other strategies, aside from patenting, are, first, to rely on trade secrets. That simply means that you try to rely on other legal instruments, such as confidentiality agreements with your suppliers or your partners that prohibit them from releasing certain details about

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  Yes, that's right. I think there are a lot of good programs available in Canada. It's beneficial always to take a look at these programs to make sure they're not becoming cases where people are maybe taking advantage of a program and are not actually generating a lot of benefits

Industry committee  Do you mean in terms of what programs to look at or pursue?