Finance committee  One of our biggest issues has been the lack of transparency, as I mentioned in my presentation. Mostly what's for sale is the expertise of our members. They're the ones who are really uncertain about what's going on, are highly stressed, and are not really being consulted. This i

Finance committee  AECL is being split up into at least two pieces, and remember, the part that's for sale doesn't really have anything to do with isotope production. The part that's for sale is the CANDU reactor division. For what it's worth, we have traditionally been the money-making part of AEC

Finance committee  That has been one of our concerns. We don't know. The bill gives the government carte blanche to do whatever it wants. The intentions are apparently not there, but the bill allows them to do it. You heard Neil mention earlier that there is a $20-billion sale by the Koreans to the

Finance committee  We haven't done a study. We have just read what other people have done. The kinds of jobs are twofold. There are the jobs we have. There are about 2,000 people in our company. There are the 30,000 jobs in the private sector that essentially exist because we exist as a company, an

Finance committee  We've been on record as stating the opposite. I'm not a businessman, but I know who our competition are. Our competition are large companies generally owned by governments, or private multinationals with many lines of business, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and Toshiba, wh

Finance committee  It might be. There are a couple of issues. One is, we have an international obligation to maintain in Canada a nuclear safety capability. For that you need a large organization, as Neil mentioned, of critical size that has the capability to demonstrate this. Right now AECL is tha

Finance committee  My name is Dr. Michael Ivanco. I'm vice-president of the Society of Professional Engineers and Associates, or SPEA, as we're called. I'm also a scientist who works for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. With me is Peter White, president of SPEA and a nuclear engineer. We represen

Natural Resources committee  It depends on how it's done. If you could restructure or privatize in a way that keeps the core design capability and the development capability together, there is no reason in principle why that would happen. When privatizations were done in the past—AECL in the late eighties wo

Natural Resources committee  I'm a technical person, not a businessman.

Natural Resources committee  I'm saying that you can't do it with a simple geographical split. It would have to be done with surgical precision, and I haven't seen that in anything I've read so far. Maybe people are doing that behind the scenes, but I'm certainly not aware of it. People generally refer to th

Natural Resources committee  I'll be speaking on our behalf for now. We're here to talk about something at the heart of Canada's nuclear industry. In principle, it's the restructuring process that's taking place within Atomic Energy of Canada over the next year. The Society of Professional Engineers and Ass

Natural Resources committee  It's the only public explanation or articulation that I've seen.

Natural Resources committee  There were a number of questions there. One of them was whether it is feasible to restart the MAPLE reactors. I don't specifically work on MAPLE technology. All I can tell you is that I know credible technical experts on MAPLE technology within my company that I work for who have

Natural Resources committee  The government of the day has been supportive certainly of my employer, in the sense that it has given them considerable funds over the last year and a half to complete the ACR-1000 design. We appreciate that. As I try to mention, the issue of isotope production, when you look

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. My name is Michael Ivanco. I have a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. I'm the vice-president of the Society of Professional Engineers and Associates. With me today is Peter White, who's president of SPEA. He happens to be an expert in safety analysis, and he is an engine