Thank you.
One of the things we have been discussing since the outages at NRU and now Petten, briefly over the last month and potentially four to six months in 2010, has been how we can address the rather substantial problems associated with these outages. We recently did a survey of our membership and determined that 80% of them say that they currently have had an impact based on the outage at NRU and at Petten, and many of them have no alternative sources. Some 53% said that they had no alternative source of the molybdenum-99-based generators.
So one of the things we have been trying to work with--and I just came from a meeting of an intergovernmental group here in the U.S. that is proposing to look at some alternatives to help in the short term with the shortages--is to use reactors based in the United States to irradiate targets, which would then be shipped to Chalk River for processing. That's one option.
One thing to keep in mind is the fact that we have plenty of reactors in the U.S. and around the world that are capable of irradiating these targets, but we have a limited number of sites that are capable of processing those targets, removing the molybdenum, and producing a quality of molybdenum that's qualified for use in humans. In particular, those sites have to be approved by the FDA in the U.S. and the TGA in order to have that material used in human imaging. So it's the processing facilities that turn out to be the bottleneck.
Of course, when a reactor the size of NRU is off-line, it creates a serious problem for us, as I mentioned, not only for the supplies that we routinely get from it, but also for the excess capacity that we can take advantage of when one of the other reactors is off-line.