Just as a point of record, we were introduced somewhere along the line as “MDS” Nordion. MDS doesn't exist anymore, so they don't own us.
In the 1980s this business was sold to a private company. Nordion has changed ownership several times, but continues to exist as a leader in the industry, proudly using this Canadian technology for the prevention and treatment of disease.
Production of cobalt-60 supports hundreds of high-quality jobs in Canada and represents significant exports. Virtually everything we produce is exported out of Canada. Canada is recognized globally for its contribution to the industry. Cobalt-60 sources are also produced in China, Argentina, and India, based on the original Canadian design, as well as in Russia on a different design. Nordion is the largest producer of cobalt-60 sealed sources in the world.
To produce cobalt-60, you take those cobalt-59 slugs, the little cylinders that are about an inch long and a quarter of an inch in diameter—25 millimetres and five millimetres, for those of you who are metric—and irradiate them in nuclear reactors. The cobalt-60 is removed from the reactor after about a two-year cook time and shipped to Nordion's facility, which is about 25 kilometres west from where we are sitting today. We use that and we make it into a sealed source. We take 16 of those slugs, we stack them together in a zircaloy tube, weld the ends, put that tube in another tube, and make what's called a “double-encapsulated” sealed source.
These sealed sources are shipped to about 200 facilities globally in more than 40 countries, where they are used for the treatment I described earlier: primarily sterilization of medical devices but also for the treatment of food and consumer products—cosmetics, pet treats, those kind of things. Sealed sources have a useful lifespan of about 20 years, or in radiological terms four half-lives. After those 20 years they're considered spent, and they get returned to Nordion. Today almost all those sources are recycled into new sources. We take the spent sources, cut them open, take the slugs out, mix those slugs with new fresh slugs from reactors, make a new source, and send them back out into the industry. The industry accepts this practice as really good stewardship.
Eventually, however, those sources can't be recycled any further and they're going to need a final home. The sources that don't get recycled get returned to the reactor site, where they're held in long-term storage very similar to the way that fuel is handled.
Currently there's no permanent disposal facility for these sources in Canada. Just for reference, the physical volume of all the sources produced to date probably number somewhere in the 80,000 range. If you took all those sources, most of which are still in use in the field, and collected them all, they would represent a volume of about 15 cubic metres, the size of an office cubicle, not very big at all.
This almost goes without saying, but the entire supply chain of cobalt-60, from production to transportation, to possession and use, and ultimately return, is highly regulated, both by the CNSC in Canada and other competent authorities around the world. The industry has an impeccable safety record, and the tracking of these sealed sources is thorough and extensive throughout their life cycle.
The Canadian government was one of the first signatories to the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, also known as the “joint convention”, and has since been joined by more than 40 other countries. One of the principles of the convention is that radioactive waste is recognized to be the ultimate responsibility of the state, and that waste should be disposed of in the state in which it was generated. Furthermore, article 28 of the joint convention specifically makes reference to the disposal of disused or spent sealed sources.
Having an appropriate return and disposal path for sealed sources reduces the likelihood of a sealed source becoming orphaned or otherwise abandoned by its owner, which would create a security or safety concern.
The CNSC requires that manufacturers of sealed sources, like us, post a financial guarantee for the ultimate disposal of sealed sources. This creates a conundrum, because there is no current final disposal site for sealed sources in Canada, and as per the joint convention, they should be returned to the place where they were manufactured.
The industry that uses sealed sources is a for-profit industry and they are willing and able to support the cost of developing and maintaining long-term storage and disposal paths. Again, this is similar to what's happening in the reactor world around fuel. The Government of Canada, however, needs to develop and support policy that will allow this to happen, meeting its commitment to the joint convention and the obligation created by pioneering this industry more than 50 years ago.
We believe there are several options available in this regard. The first involves the NWMO, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, mandated to develop a disposal solution for spent fuel from reactors and currently pursuing the development of a deep geologic repository, as you've heard. By design, cobalt-60 sources have a very similar form to spent fuel and could therefore be integrated into the spent fuel waste stream. However, the current mandate of the NWMO restricts it to spent fuel only. A change in scope to accommodate the very small volume of sealed sources I spoke about earlier seems to be a logical solution that could be supported financially by our industry in much the same way that the DGR is being supported by reactor operators today.
Another option involves the use of the facilities at Chalk River Laboratories, currently operated by CNL. While we're pleased to see that CNL is moving forward with plans to build a near-surface repository, we would need, and they would need, additional government approvals before they could accept new types of waste like spent sources or increased volumes of waste as well.
In summary, we would like to invite the Government of Canada and the related stakeholders to work closely with us in developing alternatives that will support the ongoing contribution of this really important industry to the health and well-being of people in Canada and around the world, while ensuring a safe, secure, and commercially viable final disposal path. This would also provide an opportunity for Canada to demonstrate leadership in the area of nuclear waste management and fulfill its commitments to the joint convention.
Thank you.