It's a great question. Just for clarification, when we talk about cobalt, we're talking about two kinds of cobalt. Not to get overly technical, there's what they call “low specific activity cobalt” and “high specific activity cobalt”. Low specific activity cobalt is used in most sterilization internationally. When I was referring to the approximately 70% of the cobalt-60 supply internationally, I was referring to low specific activity cobalt, and that comes from Glenn's facility at OPG and our facility at Bruce Power.
Obviously what's really important to the Canadian market is that we secure that cobalt supply long term, especially when Pickering reaches its end of life. I believe, Glenn, a week or so ago, Bruce Power and OPG signed an MOU together to look at the situation when Pickering reaches its end of life and some of our units, both at Bruce and OPG, aren't producing cobalt. What are the technical options for producing cobalt, so that we maintain that market supply?
Our plan is to replace a good portion of the high specific activity cobalt, which is currently produced at Chalk River, starting in Q1 of 2019, following the closure of the NRU in March 2018. The NRU will close, and there will be a significant HSA cobalt harvest at that point. We will have loaded the HSA cobalt literally in its last week, and it will cook for three years. When we have an outage starting in 2019, we will remove it at that point.