Tony Clement on An Act to permit the resumption and continuation of the operation of the National Research Universal Reactor at Chalk River

Mr. Chair, I would like to say there is a plan under normal circumstances.

I have said before that we were under the impression, as everyone else was, that there are regular shutdowns of the facility for, in my non-nuclear terms, maintenance or double-checking and so on.

We were first told that there was an elongation of this shutdown on December 5. From our perspective, that is when we kicked into action in order to see what could be done given that there was an unscheduled shutdown for a longer period of time.

As our visitors have suggested, when there is a half-life of 67 hours, there is not the ability to stockpile. That is the source of the critical situation in which we find ourselves.