Terminal nuclear reaction

Peterborough Examiner
May 21, 2008
Greg Weston

Terminal nuclear reaction

In 1988, Canada's nuclear agency announced construction of an "amazing...one-of-a-kind" reactor to supply critical radioactive materials for cancer and heart treatments.

Canadians were told at the time that the new Maple reactor was "urgently needed" to replace what was then a 30-year-old relic housed at the Chalk River nuclear facility northwest of the nation's capital.

Twenty years later, Canada has a pair of Maple reactors which, as promised, are indeed both unique and remarkable.

Built at a cost of $680 million, the Maples are more than 600 per cent over budget, and roughly 14 years past their promised delivery date.

But what makes these atomic marvels most amazing is the simple fact they don't work.

And now they never will.

Stephen Harper's administration is finally saying, enough is enough, and pulling the plug on one of Canada's longest-running and most expensive government boondoggles.

The Harper government's recent budget committed taxpayers to the final $80 million for the failed Maple reactors.

Late Thursday, Dale Coffin, a spokesman for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. which owns the reactors, told us the money was to complete testing of the Maples, and to finish construction of an adjacent medical isotope processing facility.

Friday morning, a press release over Coffin's name announced the federal agency was nuking the entire Maple project.

Government officials say the $80 million is, in fact, for "decommissioning" the reactors.

Bottom line: The Conservative government has wisely decided not to risk throwing any more good money after bad, and to turn the two faulty atomic contraptions into expensive scrap. Good idea.

Even if the Maple reactors finally worked perfectly, AECL currently loses something like $20 million a year on $30 million in isotope sales, the vast majority of which are to the U.S. market.

Luckily for taxpayers, the Harper government understandably had no appetite for continuing to subsidize the medical needs of Americans - forever.

The big question, of course, is what all this means for the 30,000 Canadians a week whose cancer and heart treatments currently depend on the isotope production from the one old Chalk River reactor the Maples were supposed to replace.

The answer is their fate continues to hang somewhat on a machine that celebrated its 50th birthday last December with a forced shutdown which temporarily cut off half the world's supply of medical isotopes.

The good news is the old clunker is remarkably reliable, despite its age.

Nonetheless, the isotope crisis that rocked the Harper government last year exposed the vulnerability of the world supply of these critical medical products.

The U.S. is by far the largest single consumer of medical isotopes in the world, yet it relies almost entirely on the output of Chalk River.

Simple fact is that as long as the two Maple reactors were coming on stream with enough production to supply the entire world isotope demand, there was no commercial justification for other suppliers to get into the biz.

Nuking the Maple project is likely the Harper government's way of saying the isotope market is now up for grabs.

Needless to say, the American government was not amused that a major U.S. medical emergency was caused by the shutdown of a 50-year-old Canadian reactor.

As a result, American sources in the nuclear medicine industry say it is all but certain that at least one U.S. based reactor-likely the one at the University of Missouri-will go into isotope production in the near future.

Once an alternative isotope source is established, the Canadian government should get out of the medical supply biz, and turn Chalk River into a monument to one of the great federal snafus of our time.