Thank you, Madam Chair.
I would like to approach my comments here from two levels. The first level comes from something someone said to me earlier: “It seems we're trying to do surgery with boxing gloves on.”
The development of the technology to produce isotopes is one that takes a long time and requires a lot of exacting technology, so we need a long-term plan to come to a renewed stabilization of our supplies. We also need short-term solutions. We've been hearing a little bit about both of them, and I think they need to be clearly separated in an operational sense.
The second issue I want to raise is one that's been bothering me a long time, because I'm not getting clear answers about the MAPLEs. I have worked much of my life in the milieu of reactors and I at least know some of the words, if not all the physics. Every power reactor in Canada operates with a positive void coefficient, which is shorthand for the reason why the MAPLEs were said not to be licensable. I don't have a clear answer as to whether there was a change in the regulations that made positive void coefficients untenable in new reactors or whether there really is an operational problem.
The second part around this, which I see is in today's Globe and Mail, is where the president of MDS Nordion says the MAPLEs are safe to operate and that if they could be operated at half of full power, they would produce as much molybdenum as the NRU is capable of producing. So perhaps, in the short term, we have a solution, if we could get all the documentation on the table and examined by experts, as Dr. Urbain was suggesting.
I was speaking yesterday to a senior oncologist in our centre who told me how all of the clinical trials are now in deep disarray, because the protocols for what would be done to and for patients had been written a long time ago. Now there were deviations from protocols that made it difficult to evaluate, for a time, the direction that patients' treatments are taking, especially when these are in any sense experimental treatments. He was quite dismayed about what was happening, sort of one step away from us in that regard. This is one of the knock-on effects that we are beginning to see. I'm sure this is a factor in clinical trials in many parts of Canada.
The final thing I want to say is that I am, for the most part, a thyroid cancer doctor. I've been keeping an eye on the supply of I-131, and I was assured, until the beginning of this week, that there would always be an adequate supply of I-131. But in the last two days I've been receiving a lot of e-mails telling me that the supply is in difficulty. It takes a long time to prepare patients for treatment, and it's costly to get them prepared. It's a major disruption if one is not, at the end of the day, able to deliver the radioiodine treatments, so there is some impact beginning to be felt at that level.
Thank you.