Natural Resources committee  I'll be cautious about how far I step into the domain of government policy, but certainly I can see that nuclear power is a very sound infrastructure investment, and it is something that provides clean energy with low emissions, which meets many environmental targets. Clearly, th

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to introduce to you Mr. Bill Pilkington, Chief Nuclear Officer for AECL. Bill will be taking us through a presentation regarding the NRU at Chalk River and the manner in which AECL intends to identify and then implement a solution fo

Natural Resources committee  I think it would be fair to say that three months is probably, judgmentally, looking optimistic today, but we're very reluctant to give any further guidance until we have--

Natural Resources committee  I cannot give you a precise number on that. This was in fact before either Bill or I were in our current responsibilities, so I cannot give you any number with precision at that point in time.

Natural Resources committee  Put it this way: The increase that they're going to be able to achieve, whatever that level will be, is not going to replace the production of the NRU.

Natural Resources committee  Frankly, we have been focusing 100% of our attention on fixing our own reactor. We know there are a number of officials who have been actively working with the global supply community. We're only very tangentially aware of that. We certainly do know there is a shorter outage of t

Natural Resources committee  Yes, a four-week outage.

Natural Resources committee  All of which simply points to the urgency of us getting to our job and returning the reactor to service as quickly as we can.

Natural Resources committee  I was certainly aware of everything you've stated up until the last point, which I had not personally heard. However, it's entirely possible that in order to be a sustained supplier into the world market beyond their own borders, they would need to build an enlarged processing pl

Natural Resources committee  For 18 months.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much for the question. The first action I took, unfortunately, was not one that headed directly to that goal. We had to take the very difficult decision to terminate the MAPLE reactor program. At the time I arrived, the plan was to move forward with the deployment

Natural Resources committee  To that very last point, we made the MAPLEs decision based on the best available evidence we had at that time, and nothing has changed in the intervening period. We continue to believe that discontinuing that program was the right thing to do. I should correct some misconception

Natural Resources committee  I think what I really need to do is turn back to some of the comments I just made. Until the decision was made to terminate the MAPLE program, it was very clear that the investment being made to bring that facility into service was indeed the plan AECL had to continue isotope p

Natural Resources committee  I do. I would not be supporting the efforts we have under way to be taking the steps we are to return this reactor to service if we were not confident that it was the right thing for us to be doing. It is in fact, and we've said it before, a timeless design. The reactor is indeed

Natural Resources committee  2008.