Natural Resources Committee on Feb. 7th, 2008

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

They were certainly advised on November 22 in the afternoon--if they hadn't already been aware--that the reactor would not be starting up again.

[Grant Malkoske]

That's true.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

And you reacted...you were concerned.

[Grant Malkoske]

Very concerned.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

To the point that you alerted your customers on November 23 that there would be an interruption in supply.

[Grant Malkoske]

That's right.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

Then on November 30—and I'm not sure what happened to instill confidence in your stated position—you indicated to your customers, by way of a press release, that, in so many words, things will be fine by mid-December; that's the targeted or anticipated start-up date, so just hold on for a couple of weeks, and by mid-December the isotopes will be flowing to you, and the problem will have been averted.

Is that more or less the chronology?

[Grant Malkoske]

More or less, but let me elaborate on it a little bit.

First of all, we started advising customers on November 22. We took action right away. The situation, as I mentioned, was fluid, so there was no clear timeline as to when the NRU reactor would be restarted. So there was a dialogue under way between the regulator and AECL to try to determine what had to be done, what had to be effected, to get the NRU back up.

Even going to November 30, the actual restart date was not clear. At about November 30, we had to move. We had to publicly inform our shareholders and stakeholders of what the situation was, even though after that the movement continued.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

I understand that. But is it not passing strange that in spite of the public release on November 30 about this problem, this looming crisis, the Minister of Natural Resources was apparently not aware until December 3 and the Minister of Health was not aware until December 5? Is that not odd?

[Grant Malkoske]

I'm not sure of the communication chain that might have taken place within those departments. I'd have to leave that up to you to decide.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

But you knew it, and by this time, December 3, tens if not hundreds of people were aware of the situation at Chalk River.

[Grant Malkoske]

Certainly our customers were aware of it. Other suppliers were aware of it. We were heavily into trying to get backup supply.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

Let me ask you this, if you can comfortably answer. If AECL, on November 21, had started immediately to do what the licensing obligated it to do, would that reactor not have started up much more quickly than it eventually did?

[Grant Malkoske]

It's not clear to us, because we don't have that communication between AECL and the regulator on the NRU issues, so frankly it's a communication that takes place before them. We do know that AECL and the regulator were working diligently to try to get the reactor up and running within the parameters that they had to deal with, and we ended up where we ended up.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

Is it Mister or Doctor Soublière?

[Jean-Pierre Soublière]

Mister.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

Mr. Soublière, were you on the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission board?

[Jean-Pierre Soublière]

No. I was on the board of AECL for approximately eight years. I resigned in 2006.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

And can I ask the reason for your resignation, Mr. Soublière?

[Jean-Pierre Soublière]

I had been acting chair and a new chair was appointed, and I thought it was appropriate for me to leave.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. St. Amand, your time is up.

We go now to Monsieur Ouellet from the Bloc.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like us to take note of the fact that my colleague asked you to provide the names of the senior officials with whom you had contact on November 21, when you were notified, and on November 22, when you had a meeting. I would like you to forward that to the committee.

What interests us are the isotopes that could save the people who need them in Canada, not your market, which corresponds to 50% of the world market. We're talking about Canada. You're always go back to the fact that the quantity you sell could not be produced elsewhere. We don't question that. We want to know whether it was possible to order the isotopes necessary in Canada elsewhere.

A teleconference was organized on December 10. It was the first and the last, the only teleconference that was held between the Canadian government, that is the Department of Natural Resources, and the European isotope producers. Mr. Bernard Ponsard is the physicist responsible for isotope production at the BR-2 reactor. Following that call, he said, and I quote: “The radioisotopes produced by the BR-2 reactor can supply the Canadian market.” He also said: “Canadian authorities said at the time that the crisis would be very short and there wouldn't be any long-term shortage.” The day after the call, on December 11, the government tabled an emergency bill requiring the reactor to be restarted.

I simply wanted to remind you that the Belgian reactor was on a routine shutdown at the time of the Canadian crisis. It would have been enough to reprogram it to increase its production starting December 18. The Conservatives' emergency bill gained only two days on that schedule, since Chalk River restarted on December 16.

Were you aware that Belgium and the Netherlands could meet Canada's needs?

[Grant Malkoske]

Thank you, Mr. Member.

Let me try to address the isotopes in Canada, which is your concern, and then we can talk about your request for tabling, if you wish.

First of all, it should be recognized that, as I laid out in my production chain, the isotopes that are produced in a reactor do not go directly to patients; they have to go to a radiopharmaceutical manufacturer and then to the patients. Whether that comes from the NRU reactor in Canada, the BR2 reactor in Belgium, the Osiris reactor in France, or the Petten reactor in the Netherlands, it is all the same.

I would like to inform you that we were in constant contact with IRE in Belgium, the operators of the Mol facility at BR2. In fact, we wrote them a letter from our president on November 30 imploring them to provide product to Canada. As I mentioned in my testimony, in spite of our constant discussions with them, in spite of imploring them vigorously, we did not receive anything until December 14, two days after the legislation was passed.

I would also like to address the point you made about the restart of the NRU reactor. The NRU reactor was in a scheduled maintenance shutdown when we were informed about this on November 21. It was at about that time, in fact, that the NRU reactor was to restart after its routine maintenance shutdown. So we were in a supply shortage, which started on about November 21, until Parliament acted to restart the reactor, a period of some three weeks.

I'm not sure what Mr. Ponsard might have told you, what Mr. Ponsard was implying, but in fact Mr. Ponsard was one of the people we conferred with to obtain isotope from Belgium.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you very much, Monsieur Ouellet.

We'll go now to the government side, to Mr. Trost, for up to five minutes.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a quick question for MDS Nordion to get more clarity on the timeline, because it seems to be emerging as a key issue.

Looking through another chronology I have, it says that on November 30 an e-mail from AECL government relations provided details on the shutdown of the NRU and indicated an early December return to normal. Was that very similar to the information you were getting from AECL, that the return to normal was slated for early December? When did they start to give you indication that an early December return to normal was not likely to happen?