Medical Isotope production shut down...again.

Wow. It appears that the NRU reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, is going to be shut down for a MONTH.
Canwest reporter David Akin collects reaction on his blog.

I wrote quite a lot about this the LAST time the NRU reactor shut down starting in December 2007 -- about seven or eight posts.

I'm particularly struck by the essay Dr. William Leiss wrote for this blog, and want to quote from it:

"Whom should we hold responsible for getting us into this mess—and, hopefully, for getting us out of it again? My candidates are the ministers of natural resources and health in the Government of Canada, and the officials who report to them. For who else should have noticed, sometime in the past two years at least, while AECL and CNSC were battling, that potentially tens of thousands of patients around the world were at serious risk of a disruption in the supply of nuclear isotopes?

Where was the contingency plan, devised in advance? Where was the directive given to AECL in 2006 to respond immediately and completely to the CNSC’s requirements regarding its operating license? And, knowing how important Canada’s role is in supplying nuclear isotopes for medical purposes to the world, why has the Government of Canada been sitting on its hands for so long while AECL was embarrassing itself with its Maple reactors fiasco?"

I would also recommend this archival article from the Ottawa Citizen for background.

The timeline from the last time? Here's what another Canada.com story lays out:

• 1991: EPS is one of seven safety updates that AECL and CNSC agree on to keep NRU reactor operational past original closure date of Dec. 2005.
• July 2006: Chalk River reactor licence renewed.
• Nov. 13, 2007: Problem of AECL plans and actual plant state of backup systems identified, CNSC says. Some reports say that happened Nov. 18. AECL_says CNSC knew earlier.
• Nov. 18: AECL shuts down NRU reactor for regular maintenance.
• Nov. 21: CNSC informs AECL that it is operating outside of licensing agreement. NRU stays shutdown.
• Dec. 3: Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn says this was when he foundout about NRU shutdown's impact on isotopes supply.
• Dec. 11: AECL and CNSC executives called to a special Committee of the Whole of the House of Commons to explain the NRU situation.
• Dec. 12: Bill C-38 adopted in Parliament allowing for NRU to start up again.
• Dec. 14: AECL chairman Michael Burns resigns, effective Dec. 31.
• Dec. 16: NRU restarted.
• Dec. 18: Shipments of M0-99 isotope resume.
• Dec. 19: Outstanding orders of isotopes filled.
• Dec. 23: Relay switch failure, reactor shut off.
• Dec. 24: Reactor started up again.
• Jan. 7, 2008: Root cause analysis of discrepancy submitted to CNSC
• Jan. 15: Linda Keen, the president of CNSC, is fired at 10 p.m.
• Feb. 1: Upgrade work on backup systems finished.
• Feb. 21: Brian McGee, AECL's vice-president and chief nuclear officer, resigns. He was a key figure in the controversy.

What's happened since then? As far as I can tell, not a lot.

As a communicator, I despair that the ball got dropped on this. As a person who has had cancer, and has been around a lot of other people with cancer, I'm ticked off that nobody has taken on the responsibility of making the world's isotope supply less precarious.

Ciao,
Bob.