Chalk River producing medical isotopes again
August 17, 2010
Comments on this story
(6)
John Spears
BUSINESS REPORTER
The troubled reactor at Chalk River that produces 30 per cent of the world’s medical diagnostic isotopes has resumed production after a 15-month shutdown.
But the legacy of the shutdown will be felt for months and years to come because serious illnesses have gone undetected, says the head of the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine.
About 25 per cent of nuclear medicine diagnostic tests that should have been performed across Canada have had to be cancelled since the reactor shut down, Dr. Jean-Luc Urbain said in an interview from London, Ont.
“We were not able to make diagnoses of disease like cardiovascular disease and cancer,” he said.
“What I do expect is an increase in advanced cardiovascular disease and cancer over the next few months and few years.”
He hailed the restart as “great news.”
“We probably will get isotopes in decent supply by the end of next week or the following week.”
The Chalk River plant was closed in May, 2009 when heavy water leaks were discovered.
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. which owns and operates the reactor, said Tuesday that it is now operating at high power, after a period testing at low power.
“We’re working toward getting our first shipment out this week,” said AECL spokeswoman Robin Forbes.
AECL sends all its isotopes to MDS Nordion, which in turn supplies companies that ship products to hospital and clinics.
Thomas Burnett, a spokesman for MDS Nordion, said the reactor should be able to ramp up quickly.
“They’ll move up to full production levels over the next number of days to a week,” he said in an interview.
Urbain said isotopes arrive weekly: “Early in the week, usually we have a decent supply. Later in the week we have very low isotope (supply) to work with.”
The Chalk River reactor is more than half a century old, and was supposed to have been replaced years ago by more modern reactors. But AECL was never able to get the new reactors in production and meet safety requirements, so the old reactor was kept in service.
When it initially began leaking 15 months ago, first estimates were that it would be out of service for three months, but repairs dragged on for another year.
One of the reactor’s most important products was molybdenum 99, which is used to manufacture isotopes for detecting cancers and heart ailments.
That left MDS Nordion without a supplier.
“We haven’t had any backup available” said Burnett.
MDS Nordion said that being without isotopes from the Chalk River reactor has cost the company $4 million a month in lost earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
MDS Nordion has launched a lawsuit against AECL because of its losses. It is still in the court system.
The world supply of diagnostic isotopes has been squeezed even further because a Dutch reactor has also been closed for months.
Urbain said that the future remains cloudy, because the elderly AECL reactor is only licensed until 2016.
AECL spent years, and hundreds of millions of dollars developing new reactors to produce medical isotopes, but never got them into production.
Urbain said the federal government should assemble a blue-ribbon panel of international experts to see whether the new reactors could be made to work.
“We can only deplore the fact that Canada is not embarking into a new reactor,” he said.
Instead, he said, the federal government is financing research into “uncertain technology” to find other ways of producing isotopes.
Featured Sponsored Listings