Right. I think, Cheryl, you're talking about what we're doing to divest the manufacturing and machine shops. We have about 40 or 50 people right now whose main task and the vast majority of their work is to maintain the NRU reactor. That reactor is going to be closed down permanently in March 2018. Rather than waiting for that to sneak up on us and then have no work for those individuals, we're taking a proactive approach to see if there is another model out there where work could be done, and it would use their skill sets in machining to be able to support perhaps other industries, such as the aeronautical industry or others that need that high tolerance skill sets that we will no longer need.
We will not have all those people go. We will still maintain the level that we need. This is about rightsizing properly to make sure that we have the right skill sets. We would still retain a certain portion of those individuals, because we have 17 other nuclear facilities on the site that have needs. We would have some of those needs, but the magnitude that we have, to not have to support a reactor the size of the NRU, is because we're thinking ahead.
Right now, we have an RFP out where we're seeing what the outcome would be exactly, because we still need to support what we do have to do off-site. In our RFP, there's a request that the work and whoever would get that work, would establish a shop within our radius. I can't remember the distance. I'd have to get back to you, but I think it's about 30 kilometres within the radius, or 50 kilometres, so it stays within our region where their jobs would be.
We want to see how quickly they'll be able to respond to doing our work that we'd have to have done at the sites, which would remain after that, if it was overflow from the people that we still have. The most important thing is to see how the people would be treated. What would be the conditions? We have not confirmed or we have not decided yet that we are going to do this. We have not decided yet that we are going to absolutely do this. It has to be a win-win for us and it has to be a win-win for the employees.
I have one final point on the SMRs. We would not be the manufacturer of an SMR. That is what our nuclear supply chain—we have one of the best in the world here in Canada—would be providing for us. They're the ones who would be providing it. They would also attract spinoffs in that locale for us to have more work because of the technologies that we would bring and the parts and pieces that we would have that would be assembled at the site. The technology would be brought to us, so it's not us building it and we're losing our capability to do it.