Evidence of meeting #24 for Natural Resources in the 40th Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was nru.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
There isn't an industry standard that says if you leave a reactor mothballed for more than six months, ten or twelve or eighteen...?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
Bill can speak to that.
Senior Vice-President and Chief Nuclear Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
I think that's an important point, because at no point are we mothballing the NRU reactor.
Senior Vice-President and Chief Nuclear Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
But it's an appropriate term. If you take a reactor out of service and do not maintain it for a period of time, then you're correct: the longer it's out of service, the more challenging it is to put it back into service. However, in the case of the NRU, we're actively repairing the reactor and we're maintaining it in service in a shutdown state through this whole period.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
So here's the question, the one about the MAPLEs. It seems like we put in a lot of money--was it $600 million? What was the final bill on MAPLEs? You closed the program.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
For AECL, we wrote off roughly $250 million in our main estimates last year.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
And that was the total that MAPLE cost, or were there other costs?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
That's what was on our balance sheet.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
It's pretty expensive. So the government was anticipating MAPLE was going to work out, because everyone said so. MDS Nordion still thinks MAPLE could work out.
All that time, Chalk River is stumbling along, doing its thing, getting into its 50-year anniversary. Did this delay the government? Since the expectation was that MAPLE would pick up, when you made the decision to shut the MAPLE line down, did this invigorate the conversation about what would happen next?
Conservative
President and Chief Executive Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
I believe that all along there had been consideration of many different scenarios and many different options. Clearly, making the decision geared up the process to return the NRU to a longer-term isotope production facility.
Conservative
Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My first question is about communication protocols—how you deal with a problem like this, who you inform, and why you inform them. Could you give me a brief rundown of the timeline, when it happened, who you had to inform, and why you did it?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
I'll have Mr. Pilkington respond to that.
Senior Vice-President and Chief Nuclear Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
We have several communication lines for this type of situation. When we have a forced shutdown or an unexpected shutdown of the NRU because of the loss of the off-site power, we have an obligation to inform the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission immediately.
Senior Vice-President and Chief Nuclear Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
We did that. We also have in place a communications protocol, which we put into action. This includes a decision on the apparent severity of the shutdown. That information is communicated to me by the operating staff, from me to Mr. MacDiarmid, and then, depending on the severity, it is communicated more broadly through the government.
Conservative
Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK
And this plan has been revised in the last couple of years. It seems to have worked quite well this time, relative to other periods.
Senior Vice-President and Chief Nuclear Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
Yes, we've had some practice with it. It's been in effect now for more than a year. I think it works effectively. The information gets out.
I might point out that we've recently turned our focus to communication with our stakeholders and with the public. We are now getting more information out to the public more quickly than we did in the past.
Conservative
Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK
I think it shows, because this outage doesn't seem to be having as much impact on the general public as the previous one.
Going back to some of the questions you had about the MAPLEs, I was on this committee when it was discussing the shutdown. Contrary to what I've been seeing in the press, I understood that the MAPLEs had unsolved technical problems and that there was no guarantee, no matter how much money was spent, that they would work. There was a problem with the positive coefficient when they were being shut down, instead of a negative coefficient when the power was going down. Is this correct? Were there unsolvable technical problems with no guarantee of success, regardless of money spent?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
“Unsolvable” is an absolute term. Certainly the reactor had technical problems that had defied solution up to that point. When we looked at the possibilities, all of them were highly risky, expensive, and lengthy. It was clear to us that it was not just the existence of a positive power coefficient of reactivity. It was that the actual behaviour of the reactor did not mirror the modelled behaviour of the reactor. For this reason, we were unable to state unequivocally that we knew what was causing the readings we got.
Conservative
Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK
We didn't grasp the fundamental. The engineers and physicists weren't able to get a handle on the fundamental physics to know precisely what was going on.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
In a strong safety culture, you need to know what is happening at the very guts of the device before you put it into service. We could not develop the requisite confidence level.
Conservative
Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK
I'm not a nuclear engineer, and I'm definitely not close to being a specialist in isotopes or the technical things you do, but I would assume that AECL has personnel that won't be involved in the repair of the NRU. Is AECL prepared to use its personnel and expertise to help other reactors around the world to increase production? I don't know if that's possible, or if you engage in that, but are you willing? Is it even a possibility?
