I'm just going to touch on another point that came up earlier about the way CNL is and has been run. In the days when I started at CNL, in 1968, everything was funded by the federal government. CNL had a very open policy of spinning off their technology to companies that wanted to build a nuclear business. That was quite successful for many years.
With the cutbacks in the eighties and nineties, an emphasis was put on these labs having to support themselves as much as possible. That's where this commercialization and going into competition with the private sector came in. A number of labs around the world have attempted to do that, and it has never been very successful.
I don't think CNL has ever made a very significant contribution to its overall operating costs from the commercial R and D that it's done, except during the period of 1990 to 1997, when there was a big agreement with the Ontario government when hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on CANDU.
The old model, where AECL does technology and spins it off to industry, seems to me like a good one, and I think our other guests here would agree with that perception.
The focus now seems to be on forcing CNL to continue only on the basis that it will obtain commercial R and D funding. Under that regime, there will be no new reactors developed, and there will be no neutron source ever built at Chalk River. Canada's nuclear capability will die out, and Chalk River will become a decommissioning site.
For nuclear technology to really continue in Canada, it needs the will on the part of the federal government to have a long-term nuclear future and to invest in that. Success will probably come from focusing on one system, the way CANDU was focused on. The focus was on CANDU in the early days for various reasons. We were going to use natural uranium. We couldn't build a big pressure vessel, so we had a pressure tube reactor. That kind of formed the way the CANDU reactor looked. We just focused on that, and it was very successful for the last 40 years. Now we need to look forward to what's coming next, and my—