Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and through you to our witnesses.
Mr. McDougall, my question is going to pertain to the NRC's crown jewel. The National Research Universal, the NRU reactor, is situated at Chalk River Laboratories, which the natural resources committee visited back in 2010.
I believe, Mr. Regan, you were there.
The National Research Council of Canada designed and built the NRU, which replaced the NRX as the world's largest source of neutrons, and has been host to a significant scientific community, as well as industry, for materials analysis.
In fact, NASA sent a piece of the ill-fated space shuttle Challenger's O-ring, and through the use of neutron beam scattering, which provides a unique non-destructive means of determining the atomic and/or magnetic structure of material, to determine whether the O-ring was indeed a potential cause of that tragedy.
While the NRU is currently most widely known as the world's greatest supplier of medical isotopes, it also supports the CANDU fleet of clean, economical, sustainable nuclear power generators. It has even played a key role in the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons through its fuel research, which has rendered the nuclear warhead more valuable as a source of clean energy than as a weapon of mass destruction.
The NRU continues to fill a key role in terms of national security and generally making the world a safer place to live. But Chalk River Laboratories is also the proven model for taking a scientific concept from the board to the bench through development and application across the valley of death and on to commercial manufacturing.
One example is the passive autocatalytic recombiner, which, had it been installed in Fukushima's reactor building, would have prevented the hydrogen explosions during that situation.
My question, Mr. McDougall, refers to the NRC's neutron beam centre that arose from Nobel Prize winner Bertram Brockhouse's research. What role do you see the Canadian Neutron Beam Centre having with respect to Canadian innovation?