Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I'll tell you a little bit about our background.
Before starting at McMaster in 2001, I spent 14 years at the NRU reactor in Chalk River. I started my career there as a young engineer in charge of operating the shift. I moved on to senior technical positions, and before coming to McMaster, I was the engineering manager at NRU.
With me is Dr. John Valliant, who is a professor with the university. He's both a Canadian and an internationally recognized leader in medical isotope research. In addition to teaching, he is the acting director of the McMaster Institute of Applied Radiation and Sciences. He is also the CEO and chief scientific director for the newly founded Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization.
Mr. Dave Tucker has over 20 years of radiation safety and regulatory compliance experience. Dave also spent 10 years at the Chalk River laboratories, where he had radiation, environmental, and regulatory compliance responsibilities for the NRU reactor, as well as the other associated facilities necessary for isotope production.
McMaster University is a medium-sized Canadian university. We have 20,000 undergraduate students, 3,000 graduate students, supported by a staff of about 7,000. We're a research-intensive university. We have a large research budget, given the size and constitution of our university, and our unique combination of nuclear facilities and graduate and undergraduate programs result in us being Canada's nuclear university.
I will talk a little bit about how McMaster can help on the isotope supply issue. We've approached the problem from the short term, medium term, and long term. In the short term, we've had to increase our I-125 production. The reactor at McMaster University is currently a global supplier of I-125. With the outage at Chalk River, we've been able to increase our production by 20%. This 20% is going to help prostate cancer patients, both here in Canada and around the world. Every week we're shipping to Europe, South America, North America, China. Right now, we're the largest producer of that isotope.
Our colleagues on campus, at the hospital, under the leadership of Dr. Karen Gulenchyn, have brought F-18 quickly to the clinic in support of helping display some of the treatments that rely on technetium. We continue to provide a leadership role in developing the next generation of isotopes and truly have the core-to-clinic infrastructure to carry that out.
In the medium term, we have proposed to the government to resume moly-99 production at the reactor, as we did in the seventies, and we believe we can help about 20% of North American men. Also, through the Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization, there are already new displacement technologies in front of Health Canada, soon to gain approval, hopefully, to get to the patients.
In the longer term, we intend to continue our leadership role in research for the displacement technologies through the development of the next-generation medical isotopes and through novel production techniques and applications.
A little bit about the reactor. We're the only Canadian research reactor with a full, reinforced containment structure. We are adjacent to the nuclear research building, which allows researchers close proximity to the isotopes they need to conduct their research. We're a five-megawatt MTR, or materials test reactor, design. It's an open-pool design, which is very flexible and conducive to isotope production. We currently operate on three megawatts, 16 hours a day, five days a week. For the types of isotopes that are required, we'd need to go to seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
As I said, we are in this commercial isotope production. Again, we are a global leader in I-125 production and distribution. We have a flexible and very useful and relevant education and research tool, and we hope to maximize the benefit of this infrastructure through the addition of more isotope production.
We're currently licensed until 2014, with full plans to renew our licence going forth for many years to come.
On slide 5 we've collected a couple of pictures and some data from what we did in the 1970s. Quite simply, in the isotope supply chain you need targets. We had targets manufactured. Targets were loaded into an irradiation facility. We would irradiate them for about two weeks and ship the targets to Chalk River to have them processed to recover the moly-99. During that time we made over 80 shipments and shipped over 100,000 curies of moly-99 to Chalk River. The demand at that time was much lower, so these numbers certainly don't represent our capacity.
The next slide gives you an overview of the reactor. If you look at the nine-by-six grid, each one of those blank locations is where we would put a fuel rod or fuel assembly to power the reactor. If you remember what the target irradiation holder looks like, it's exactly the same as a fuel rod or a fuel assembly. Each one of those white holes is a potential moly-99 production site.
At the bottom slide we've done some calculations on capacity. We've looked at two assemblies and four assemblies. Those numbers would be equivalent to about 20% of the North American demand. It isn't the entire demand, but it certainly could reach a significant number of patients in critical need of these isotopes.
I'd like to compare NRU and MNR, because a lot of people don't know much about the actual production of isotopes. It's all the game of flux: the amount of neutrons and target material you can get into your core. From the little comparison there you can see that NRU and MNR can irradiate the same amount of targets, but our limitation to approximately 20% of the North American market is borne out by the difference in flux between the two reactors.
On the next slide I describe the supply chain for isotopes in Canada, how McMaster can play a role, and how we played a role in the 1970s. We have our targets manufactured in France at a company called CERCA. They currently make all the irradiation targets for the European supply chain, and they make our fuel. They're tooled up and licensed to take on this work. Targets are inventoried at the Chalk River lab and brought to the reactor for irradiation on demand. We irradiate the targets for about 200 hours—about a week, ship them to ACL for processing, and then to the normal supply chain as it exists in Canada right now.
When we first looked at this proposal 18 months ago, we really saw a role for McMaster to help NRU relieve some of the pressure they have on their operating cycle. Right now they have a six-week operating schedule. Then they have a very short shutdown window of about four days. The first day they get ready to do the work and the last day they start up. They really are under a lot of pressure to do a lot of outage work in a very short period of time. We thought McMaster could help extend that outage window to allow them to take on longer inspections, more involved maintenance, and relieve some of the pressure the machine was under.
As we see it now, we can come online in a different mode, in a crisis mode, certainly not to meet the entire supply that NRU is providing, but to bring Canadian content to the international solution the federal government is looking to position.
The European model works well because they rely on a number of different machines to do the irradiations with one central processing facility. That's what we're trying to replicate here in Canada, with a machine at Chalk RIver that can do irradiations and a back-up machine in McMaster that can also irradiate targets. So you would have a distributed radiation system with one central processing facility. This model has worked well for Europe for a number of years and has kept them with a more robust supply when one facility was going through an outage.
I think the key requirements we're looking for are the staff and the fuel to take on the new duty cycle. It's quite simply scaling up. We have a certain number of staff for 16 hours a day, five days a week. In order to make this process work, we require more fuel and more people to go to a 24-hour, seven-day a week duty cycle, as we did in the 1970s.
As I pointed, we're just one member of the supply chain. It requires cooperation with a number of stakeholders, including the federal government, AECL, and those further down the supply chain. We really need to establish strong partnerships focused on a mandate to make this happen.
One of the issues that came up was the access to HEU. In recent discussions with the Americans, it's our impression that they would be more than willing to supply the target material to France to allow targets made to be irradiated at the university.
On a regulatory front, it will be very important to work with our regulators throughout this process. We see no direct change in our reactor operating licence requirements. We've done this work before. Our safety analysis report addresses this operation. We will need licensing of a flask to transfer the irradiated material, but again we'll look to the Europeans to get their designs and technical knowledge to support us on that.
We'd have to start working with Nordion to look at the impacts downstream on getting it to the patient. We're talking about using the exact same chemical composition for the targets, but the NRU target has a different geometry than a McMaster target. The NRU target is pin-shaped, whereas the McMaster target and most of the other targets used around the world are of a pleat design.
In conclusion, we're here to help. We're a Canadian institution and we're ready to use Canadian infrastructure to help Canada through this issue. We believe we can have an impact in the short term, medium term, and long term. We don't claim to be the final solution, but I think it has become clear to the international community that this is a complicated problem with no quick solution. It will require an international effort looking at a number of different solutions and coming together to protect patients around the world.
Thank you.
