Evidence of meeting #27 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.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit
Thank you, Mr. Trost.
We'll go now to the third round and the official opposition.
Mr. Regan.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Heysel, how quickly could you get up and running producing technetium-99m?
5:05 p.m.
Director, Nuclear Operations and Facilities, McMaster Nuclear Reactor, McMaster University
We were looking at 18 months. With a different environment and NRU operating at full capacity with no interruption, to give a concrete date to operation, I know it will be less than 18 months. I'm limited in commenting because this process involves a number of stakeholders and I need their input to give a new date that reflects the current environment where there is an acute shortage.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
Let's go back to a year ago, when you learned the MAPLEs were cancelled and you put forward a proposal to the government. If you had received the green light then, would you be producing moly-99 now, in your view?
5:05 p.m.
Director, Nuclear Operations and Facilities, McMaster Nuclear Reactor, McMaster University
It's quite possible we would be producing it. At the time it was a different environment. The government was looking at a very complicated problem and trying to find the best solution that deployed my tax dollars in the most responsible way. Right now it's easy for me and my colleagues to say that the crisis is here and we should have been on this 18 months ago, but that wasn't the environment then.
We're a Canadian institution, we believe our infrastructure is positioned to help Canadians, and we're here to help. If it's on our solution, that's great for McMaster and Hamilton. If it's on a B.C. solution or a McGill solution, we're willing to help on any technical solution we can. But we need direction at this time to really get our focus on this project and to expedite it.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
You say it would have required the government to make this a priority for a number of departments. Clearly that did not happen in relation to what you proposed.
Let me go on to Ms. Keen and ask about the inspections and how they're done. How was it possible there was a significant amount of corrosion, as we've seen, without AECL noticing it sooner? How does that happen? What's your sense of that?
5:10 p.m.
Specialist, Safety and Risk Management, As an Individual
First of all, the webcasts of the CNSC meeting of June 11 are still available on the net, so all of this is public knowledge.
There were a lot of questions by the commission members about how this happened over the period of time--the concentrations on the vessel itself, the corrosion of the vessel. The commission members asked a lot of questions. The first vessel was replaced after 20 years, so why wasn't the second one looked at in terms of a risk for that? There was a lot of discussion about that. There were a lot of questions by the commission members as to the way the inspection happened in 2000. It didn't provide a broad view.
Until AECL finishes this complete assessment of it--it was new knowledge that hadn't been available publicly before--it isn't absolutely clear how many corrosion sites there are, the depth of that corrosion, and what the answer is. So I think AECL is being fulsome now in saying that there's a problem.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
June 16th, 2009 / 5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
As a visitor to this committee who doesn't know much about nuclear technology.... Dr. Ryan, when you speak of building a new research reactor, I imagine you have in mind a reactor built with a particular kind of technology. How would this relate to MAPLE technology or CANDU technology?
If we had trouble creating a MAPLE reactor, does that mean we might have trouble building a new research reactor, or would we be using something more proven? I'm coming at it from the point of view of a layperson trying to understand all of this.
5:10 p.m.
Prof. Dominic Ryan
I don't fully understand what went wrong in the design and production of the MAPLE reactor. There are MAPLE reactors in Korea that function, so I don't think it's inherent to the design. There is a long history of building research reactors around the world. A new one was just commissioned in Australia without too much trouble.
The difference between a research reactor and a power reactor is that they usually have higher flux cores, a different layout of the core, and they run at lower temperatures and lower pressure. So they're actually in some sense simpler to run and operate because you don't push the materials as hard. What you're using them for is an environment to test other materials or to draw off neutron beams. I don't think that once you put a proper team in place to do the design work that there will be any problem designing and building a nuclear reactor that would serve our purposes in Canada. I think the expertise is certainly there. I don't think I would have any hesitation in moving forward on that plan.
Remember, this is a multi-purpose facility we're talking about, so it serves many, many communities. One of the issues that came up from one of the members was whether we are going where the puck used to be, by building one of these facilities. When we built NRU we didn't even know what the game was. So that's a lot of vision. One thing I can be sure of is that when we build a replacement research reactor, it will not be doing the same jobs in 50 years that we built it for. That's for sure, because things will change. Things will move on. Different medical isotopes will be developed and be produced, and probably different techniques for studying engineering materials will have been developed and be used there. Different research techniques will be going on.
All we know is that if you build a flexible enough facility, people will find ways of using it in ways you didn't even imagine. That's what happened at NRU, and I believe that's what will continue to happen as we develop these new facilities.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit
Thank you, Mr. Ryan. Thank you, Mr. Scarpaleggia.
To Mr. Allen, for up to five minutes.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB
Thank you, Chair.
I just want to pick up on one of the last questions Mr. Anderson asked with respect to private and public sector involvement in these projects. One of the comments you made early on, Mr. Ryan, was about subsidizing the treatment around the world. It's a good recognition, I think, of what is actually happening today with much of the isotope production coming out of Chalk River. Also, Mr. Heysel, you said that in the long term you're looking to develop the next generation of medical isotopes. It makes me wonder, in terms of that type of research, if you were producing the moly-99, how that is going to infringe on your ability to do the research to produce the next generation.
It just seems to me we have five of these reactors around the world, all of which are 45 years old or more, and we've put all our eggs around the world in this one basket. It seems to me that having a distributed system of many different technologies makes more sense. So I'd like to ask each of you if you believe a distributed system is better, and also tell me what your cost-recovery mechanism is under each of the technologies. I'm assuming that even if we had a major research reactor built for $800 million, somehow you'd want to separate the isotope production, that it's a truly commercial venture.
I would like each of you to comment on your technologies in terms of what your cost recovery will be--and specifically McMaster, because you had the proposal you were thinking about. Obviously it's not going to be to subsidize production around the world.
5:15 p.m.
Director, Nuclear Operations and Facilities, McMaster Nuclear Reactor, McMaster University
Certainly, we're used to paying our own way. That's been the mandate in front of me at the university for the last eight years I've been there. We don't get any government operating funds, either federal or provincial. We're mandated to pay our salaries and our fuel and our equipment out of our operating budget, which comes from taking on commercial activities, including isotope sales. So we're used to balancing the books.
When we looked at the moly-99 proposal, to help on that one, it was clear from the government that they didn't want to support this long term. But they were also cognizant of the fact that if they wanted us to help, infrastructure and start-up funding would be a reasonable ask from the universities. So the money I talked about earlier would be the operating funds over five years, which is a lot of money, but still the goal of the university is and always has been to pay our own way coming out of this.
So I think you can do it, and I think we have proven that we've done it before. We hope to do it again.
5:15 p.m.
Director, Isotope Research, McMaster Nuclear Reactor, McMaster University
You just made a comment about the impact on the research at the university. We're very fortunate. We have a centre of excellence in the next generation of probes and radiopharmaceuticals that works parallel with the reactor, and because of the design of the reactor, we're able to do multiple tasks in parallel. So in fact this initiative augments the broader scope of what we do.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB
Are there other comments on the technology, specifically a distributed model whereby we're not relying on one technology going forward, but we have a whole batch of technologies that the private and public sectors can play a role in? Does that make sense, so that we don't have all our eggs in one basket?
5:15 p.m.
Director, TRIUMF
I think that was the model I was using. I imagine the accelerators play a role of supporting the supply of molybdenum to Canada, so if you were relying on a reactor or a group of reactors—they could be U.S. reactors—then you would always have a fallback position with something that's able to supply Canada's needs. The accelerator proposal does not put Canada in a position where they would supply isotopes to the world. It's not intended to do that.
But you could, for example, put accelerators in the U.S. You could put them in Boston, you could put them in L.A., and do local regions that way. That's the model, really, with accelerators, because they're small.
5:20 p.m.
Conservative
Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB
You commented about the accelerators, and you already have accelerators today that can produce moly-99. What is the price tag on some of these, as opposed to an $800-million research reactor?
5:20 p.m.
Director, TRIUMF
For the machine we talk about, the accelerator itself—and you have to talk about the whole show, as you know—is about $50 million. You have to then have the facility for shielding and processing and all that. That's on top of it. But you need that for any facility, whatever you're using.
5:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit
Mr. Allen, your time is up.
We'll go now to Mr. Anderson, for up to five minutes.
5:20 p.m.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
I actually could give my time to Mr. Allen if he still needs to follow up.
The Minister of Natural Resources announced an expert review panel that's being set up to review the options for producing medical isotopes. Do you folks think your technologies should be considered? Are you planning to make a proposal and be involved in that group?
I see the folks from McMaster saying yes. I'm just wondering about the others. Mr. Lockyer is saying the same thing. Good.
I'd like to go back to a couple of comments made by Ms. Keen. You said you wanted to try to get the issue of the MAPLEs into 2006 and later. You said it was from 2006 and on that it became clear there was a positive coefficient of reactivity.
I did some checking here. Idaho was in and did their analytical work in 2005, and they'd been in there prior to that as well. Were you not aware that they were working with AECL earlier on, in the mid-2000s?
5:20 p.m.
Specialist, Safety and Risk Management, As an Individual
Any licensee is able to bring in whoever they wish at any time to advise them. What I was talking about is when it was clear that there was a problem at the commissioning phase. That's when we became aware of that. I'm not trying to make it 2006 or whatever; I'm just saying that it was really in the later stages that we had a clear issue in the commissioning. It was when it was commissioned that we really knew this was an extremely serious problem for everyone--in a hearing.