Thank you for the question.
Immediately after the event happened on March 11, 2011, through the CANDU Owners Group we formed a group called the CANDU industry integration team. This was a group of leaders from all the utilities, both domestic and international. We started to identify and build a strategy toward responding to the event, based on the best information we had at the time. As more information came out, we fine-tuned our strategy. Through the CANDU industry integration team we also had a mechanism for having a dialogue with the regulator. We kept the regulator informed of the direction in which we were heading, and the regulator in turn kept us informed of where their expectations were also heading. So we maintained a dialogue but still independence between regulator and operator.
Because we were working together as a group, we were able to have different utility members of that group participate in different international forums, so we were able to cast a large net that captured what the international community was doing and bring it back into the COG community. Then we tuned it to our particular technology.
The CANDU reactor has some inherent features that are excellent for the kind of event that happened at Fukushima. The most notable of these is that, unlike any other power reactor, the CANDU reactor essentially sits in a pool of cold, low-pressure heavy water that's about 250 tonnes, and then is surrounded by another pool of cold light water that's about 500 tonnes. So if there were a loss of power, you have immediately 750 tonnes of cold water right there that helps to mitigate the progression of the accident. We leveraged that and identified what additional mitigation strategies we could put into place to significantly or indefinitely prolong the cooling to the reactor should the primary and backup systems fail, as they did at Fukushima.
We built a whole new line of defence in depth based on portable equipment that could be brought in, easily and quickly connected, to feed those water systems that were already there that were keeping the reactor cool, and because of the design of the CANDU reactor, we had quite a bit more time available to bring in that portable equipment. We leveraged that, so we built that into the strategy. I believe we have a very solid base now for being able to say that if there is any kind of unexpected event, we have multiple different ways, not only within the plant but by bringing in portable equipment from outside the plant, to terminate the event earlier, before it progresses into a severe accident.