Maybe to answer so everyone understands, since we are the producers of molybdenum-99 and technetium-99m, we can serve ourselves first. When we are no longer producers, we will have to go on the international market.
Our neighbours, the Americans, rely on us to feed them with technetium. They will no longer have us to supply them, so what can you expect? You will probably be faced with a spot market on technetium, and our American friends will take everything at prices we will probably not be able to afford—or very few of us will be able to afford—and our health system will collapse, essentially. This is one aspect.
The other aspect I would like to comment on is the regulator. It is a fact that throughout the world the research reactors are subjected to the same regulations as the large power reactors. Canada is not different from other countries in that respect.
It is also my point of view that certainly we can operate a reactor with a positive coefficient of reactivitiy. Certainly the safety of the installation relies not on performing accidents in the core and establishing the failure probabilities; the safety case is based on simulations and is consigned in a safety report. If you cannot predict how a simple coefficient is behaving, you probably cannot assure the public that your installation is working as it should. And you are saying to the public, “Here is the risk; it is consigned in my safety report”. But I cannot be certain my power coefficient is right, so can I be sure my complex safety analysis is right or not? These are all done on a calculation basis. They are not done on commissioning tests.
So I concur with the point of view of the safety commission that it is not too rigid to operate the MAPLE. I think the regulator is concerned that because you cannot correctly predict these coefficients, you cannot properly predict how the reactor is going to behave in even more complicated situations involving the coupling together of all these effects.
I do not think in this case we were facing too rigid a regulator. We are facing the simple fact that there are physical effects we are not able to predict at this time, so there are probably other effects we cannot be sure we will be simulating for the safety analysis, which has an impact on how the safety systems work and how the regulating systems also work.