Natural Resources committee  For the machine we talk about, the accelerator itself—and you have to talk about the whole show, as you know—is about $50 million. You have to then have the facility for shielding and processing and all that. That's on top of it. But you need that for any facility, whatever you'r

Natural Resources committee  I think that was the model I was using. I imagine the accelerators play a role of supporting the supply of molybdenum to Canada, so if you were relying on a reactor or a group of reactors—they could be U.S. reactors—then you would always have a fallback position with something th

Natural Resources committee  I just want to say that there are ideas out there other than the one I just described. The National Research Council, along with the small company Mevex, for example, has proposed using moly-100 targets from which you can remove a neutron and make moly-99. There's another proposa

Natural Resources committee  I would say we're focused on the medium term, not on tomorrow but on four to five years.

Natural Resources committee  The moly-98-plus neutrons process is done already in the world. There's a lot of that made, but the generators are not of the quality that we use in North America. That's the purification scheme. I think the time scale for that is similar. For the moly-100, the removing of a neut

Natural Resources committee  TRIUMF is a basic research facility. We normally do particle physics and nuclear physics and look toward the future. When the problems with the MAPLE reactor occurred, we were not thinking about producing moly-99. I don't think it's a natural place the government would call to as

Natural Resources committee  We don't produce moly-99 now, and it's not something we'd proposed to produce in the future until we realized there was a problem. So we put up our hand and said we were able to do it.

Natural Resources committee  No, but we did realize it after the MAPLE reactors were cancelled.

Natural Resources committee  We realized that ourselves.

Natural Resources committee  TRIUMF requested support to have a workshop with international experts to look at what we were considering. My colleagues here were part of it, and that was funded by Natural Resources Canada. So we did get some assistance, and we produced a report last November.

Natural Resources committee  I'm taking the position that you can use a very simple accelerator to produce moly-99. It's not an accelerator that's designed to produce neutrons. A neutron research facility is a completely different object. You're not going to do neutron research as he's talking about with the

Natural Resources committee  I think the accelerator time scale is the medium time scale I've told you. So it's 2015.

Natural Resources committee  I was going to paint a bigger picture. The world relies on moly-99 now for most of its procedures, but there is growing interest in PET imaging, which Canada is already investing in. There are about a dozen medical centres around Canada that already have cyclotrons and PET imagin

Natural Resources committee  The process we're talking about, which is photofission of U-238, should produce the same product as is produced in the NRU using U-235. So our demonstration that we're looking forward to in 2012 would actually show that to be true. Once you see that it's the same product, then yo

Natural Resources committee  I have a quick answer: I don't know how to answer that question.