Why Chalk River's '1957 Chevy' still has no backup reactor

Finally the story of what is really wrong in the isotope production crisis. This story shows that MDS Nordion was involved from the beginning. There is a private public connection all the way along. AECL has been incompetent and MDS Nordion was unwilling to spend the money necessary to bring production up to snuff so the reactors were dumped back into the hands of the public. What is supposed to happen in this "hospitalisation" technique is that the public taxpayer pays for the rehabilitation and the installation of the new reactors. However, those involved seem to be incompetent The new reactors were to be up and running in 1992 but they are still not up and running and no one knows when they will be.
This passage is most revealing:
. By 2004 the costs had reached $304 million, far over the projected $140 million. MDS Nordion, which was paying for the work, finally had enough. It abandoned its plan to own and operate the reactors. AECL agreed to pay $25 million to MDS and got a 40-year deal to supply MDS with isotope materials produced by the two new reactors. It also got $53 million in inventory from MDS.
What has happened is that MDS Nordion was spending too much on the project so ownership of the losing proposition goes back to the good old tax-payer. We got a "deal" to supply isotopes to MDS Nordion for 40 years. I think it was MDS Nordion that got the deal. We got stuck with poorly built over-budget reactors. Now Gary Lunn makes a safety regulator responsible for making sure that MDS Nordion gets it isotopes. Crony capitalism works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.




Sunday » January 20 » 2008

Why Chalk River's '1957 Chevy' still has no backup reactor

Tom Spears
Canwest News Service


Sunday, January 20, 2008


OTTAWA -- There would be no political meltdown over the nuclear shutdown in Chalk River, Ont., if the aging reactor had a backup. The scandal behind the scandal is the $300-million replacements that don't work properly.

Back in 1991, Bill MacCallum had a problem. It began on his first day as head of isotope sales for the company now called MDS Nordion (originally Nordion International Inc.).

His buddy phoned him as he was moving into his new office. "Are you sitting down?" the friend wondered.

The source of all the isotopes, the aging NRU reactor at Chalk River, had shut down. The reactor itself was fine, but there was a breakdown of some of the radioactive material inside it.

The new head of sales had nothing to sell - and wouldn't, it turned out, during six months of cleanup operations.

MacCallum, now retired and living in Ottawa, recalls having many sleepless nights as customers all over the world depended on this stream of materials for nuclear medicine.

"What pulled our fat out of the fire was the other reactor, NRX," MacCallum recalls. It was an ancient machine, completed in 1947, but it worked well enough to keep the isotope supply flowing, with a short interruption.

Still, customers weren't happy at the unsettled state of affairs. So MacCallum had a photographer shoot pictures of the half-finished new reactor at Chalk River, then called MAPLE-X. He went to a nuclear medicine conference and showed off all the reassuring pictures of the finished control room and calandria (a central reactor part) and so forth, telling people the new reactor would be finished and ready to operate by 1992.

It wasn't.

It still isn't.

There are now two MAPLE reactors (MAPLE-1 and -2). Both are, in fact, complete and capable of running, but neither has permission to enter production from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the same regulatory body that ordered the venerable NRU shut down for November and much of December.

And there's still no official target date for commissioning them, leaving the task of producing 80 per cent of the world's nuclear medicine isotopes to a reactor that, though running well, is 50 years old.

MacCallum calls it "the '57 Chevy."

When Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission head Linda Keen ordered the NRU shut down in December until a backup cooling system could be installed, all parties in Parliament voted to have the reactor turned back on so that patients would not be deprived of isotopes. And when Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn fired Keen on Tuesday, the political firestorm was fanned.

All because the NRU has no backup and has not been replaced.

The official history says target dates for operating two new reactors were 2000 and 2001, though MacCallum insists the original plans were for a much earlier start.

The reactors have cost more than $300 million, although their estimated cost at the start had been $140 million.

And if there's a fundamental problem underlying our shaky supply of medical isotopes, it's probably not wise to blame the 50-year-old NRU reactor. That one is running smoothly. The problem lies in its new but chronically shutdown replacements, the twin MAPLEs.

Rick Holt, who teaches nuclear engineering at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., says the reliable old NRU "is like the old woodsman's axe. You know the story? The woodsman says he's had the same axe for 25 years, only it's had eight new heads and 17 new handles."

The original design, he notes, was "very conservative," since nuclear engineers of the 1950s didn't always know what to expect. Their caution has paid off in a machine that keeps on running, though it sometimes needs upgrades, like the backup water pumps that caused the showdown with the regulators in November.

As for the MAPLEs, there is no longer an official target date for starting production.

"Right now we're going through a series of tests that CNSC has asked us to conduct, and we are scheduled to have those completed in the spring," said Dale Coffin, a spokesman for Atomic Energy of Canada, which owns the reactors.

"The results of those tests will indicate what the path forward and the schedule will be. So until those tests are completed - right now it's difficult to say with any degree of certainty what the schedule is."

The reactor produces molybdenum-99, a radioactive material that is transformed into materials used in nuclear medicine, such as scans that look inside the body.

While Chalk River produces the bulk of the world's supply of these medical radioisotopes, other countries aren't eager to get into the business: it's not worth building a whole reactor just to get one byproduct.

MAPLE stands for Multipurpose Applied Physics Lattice Experiment.

The twin reactors are identical. They're far smaller than the original Chalk River reactors or the behemoths that make your electricity - each is more on the scale of a research reactor that you might find in a university physics department.

The MAPLEs' troubles became public in 2001, when the Ottawa regulators said its safety systems - which shut down the reactor if there's a trouble - weren't working right.

The safety regulators said problems ran through the design, installation and supervision of these shut-off systems. These systems on the MAPLE-1 reactor jammed repeatedly during testing.

In fact, one of the subcontractors on the job had cut corners with a shoddy machining job on equipment called shutdown rods.

These rods are made of material that absorbs neutrons. If the reaction runs out of control, they are designed to drop into the reactor and stop radiation flying around, ending the nuclear fission reaction. But the contractor allowed metal shavings to get inside the safety system where they jammed the rods that are supposed to drop down. Like a piston stuck in a cylinder, the rods jammed.

The company acknowledged that in the case of the machine shavings, it checked the subcontractor's paper record - which was inaccurate - but didn't examine the work itself.

Regulators blamed AECL management for not overseeing the installation.

"AECL maintained an insufficiently questioning attitude" throughout the project, the regulators concluded.

It accused AECL of withholding some important information in reports to Ottawa.

"We consider this to be evidence of inadequate internal review within AECL," the commission wrote.

Even after the breakdowns, it said, four of AECL's 10 follow-up actions were "inadequate.''

AECL officials responded that the reactors were ready for commissioning and to begin operating within months. It promised to be more vigilant about construction.

But that didn't end the disputes between the company and its safety overseers.

The Nuclear Safety Commission continued to claim AECL showed "significant weakness" in staffing, training, safety analysis, quality assurance, maintenance and surveillance, monitoring of waste water for nonradioactive pollutants, and financial guarantees for eventual decommissioning and cleanup.

And then, in turn, the more complex problem of reactivity surfaced.

As a safety feature, each reactor was designed to have that nuclear reaction in its core decrease as the machine produces more power. Instead, tests found that the nuclear reaction increases when it powers up. That's called a positive coefficient of reactivity.

Safety planning was done on the basis that there would be negative reactivity. So the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has ordered AECL to fix the problem - something that hasn't worked out yet.

"Right now our modelling is showing it's slightly positive and the commission is looking to see it slightly negative," Coffin said.

The models are time-consuming, and the company can't run the reactor at high power in the meantime to do its testing.

This single issue has caused most of the delay in recent years, he said.

All this was expensive. By 2004 the costs had reached $304 million, far over the projected $140 million. MDS Nordion, which was paying for the work, finally had enough. It abandoned its plan to own and operate the reactors. AECL agreed to pay $25 million to MDS and got a 40-year deal to supply MDS with isotope materials produced by the two new reactors. It also got $53 million in inventory from MDS.

AECL's Coffin said he didn't know the current cost estimates for completing the job, as MDS and AECL each have a share in them.

Ottawa Citizen

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© CanWest News Service 2008








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