As I mentioned, we supply to a radiopharmaceutical manufacturer. They are one of the two suppliers who supply back to Canada. Bristol-Myers Squibb and Covidien are the suppliers of radiopharmaceutical products to Canada. We supply Bristol-Myers Squibb with the medical isotopes that go into their finished products. Covidien obtains their material from the Netherlands. So there is a dual supply stream.
On the first part, about a plan B, I agree with you that this is a tenuous situation. I think what we need is a national isotope supply strategy for Canada. At 50 years old, the NRU reactor is the most reliable reactor in the world. It has a 97% supply reliability. It stands as the pre-eminent reactor in all of the world to do that. So an investment into the NRU infrastructure to keep it operating, to keep it licensed beyond 2011, we believe is absolutely essential.
The MAPLE reactors are solely dedicated isotope production reactors. One alone could provide the capacity that we require. The second one is a complete backup system. Bring the MAPLE reactors on line as quickly as possible.
So we think there is a plan B. But the difficulty we all face today in the world is the eventuality of a precipitous event like NRU. It would be something like if Saudi Arabia were shut down from supplying gas or oil to the world, what would you do immediately? There would be a shortage. That's the kind of situation we were facing with NRU.
So it's not a matter of planning for such a precipitous event. How do you do that? The global capacity was only able to fill 15% of the NRU gap. If NRU had continued on, it would still be a 15% gap. So planning three months or six months in advance would not have alleviated that situation. It is interesting to note that during this period of outage we contacted the Belgians, we contacted the people in the Netherlands, and we contacted the South Africans on November 23 to try to get any incremental amount of backup supply that we possibly could. We were very diligent; we consistently went through that.
Interestingly, during this outage there was one European reactor that was down completely during that outage period because of a pre-planned maintenance cycle. It did not come on line until somewhere around December 18. Interestingly enough, a reactor in France shut down during that period, before Bill C-38 was passed. What kind of planning would prevent that from happening?
There is a global capacity issue that needs to be dealt with. That is the fundamental issue in all of this.