Chalk River, Canadian Conundrum

Well, I finally have a grab bag of things to talk about. With the bus strike now over the 50 day mark, I am getting close to wanting to rant about that again. However, my pet topic of progress and things nukular has come up in the news again, so I feel I should talk about it first. Especially since was yet again about safety at Chalk River, which I have been on and off again thinking about blogging about since the first shutdown which was now several years ago.

Just yesterday, I read that on December 5th of last year, the NRU reactor at Chalk River had a radioactive leak. Not the potential for. An actual leak, Long Island style. To add insult to injury, the reactor's cooling system has a 2.5" long leak in one of the pipes, and is losing thousands of gallons a day in coolant water. The solution to date has been to pump more water in, as it would take too long to shut the reactor down and repair it.

Apparently, AECL has officially determined that the radioactive leak on the 5th was nothing to worry about it. This is magnanimous of them, since I find it odd that yesterday was the first that it was even in the papers. What if the leak had been more "serious"? Incidents like these merely damage the reputation of nuclear power in the public's eyes. They justify the scare-mongering that goes on about the nuclear industry, and that is something that keeps me distraught about the future of nuclear power, and unless other viable fossil fuel alternatives come along very soon, the long term future of electrification.

This is a huge vicious circle. In a perfect world, reactors would get down for any repairs that were required for safety. Also in a perfect world, shutting down any single reactor wouldn't put most of the world's medical isotopes off the market. But there aren't more reactors, because people are afraid of what could happen if there's an accident, because the reactors are potentially unsafe.

So do we build more reactors to make it possible to shut down unsafe reactors for repair? Or do we make the existing reactors safe so it's politically possible to build more reactors so the isotope supply to be secure in event of a reactor shutdown?

Eventually, repairs will have to be made at Chalk River. The NRU reactor (the one in question) came online in 1957. The reaction chamber was replaced in 1971, and a new replacement chamber is READY, but would require a 1 year shut down to do. NRX was decomissioned in 1992, so there currently isn't a backup to NRU. If another reactor isn't built to share the load, when will this take place? If NRU has a major accident and requires cleanup or replacement, it will be hard to find these medical isotopes THEN. Let alone the health risks of a major nuclear disaster that close to Canada's capital city. If NRU can't be shutdown, maybe they should be looking at a new reactor, then refurbishing NRU after the new reactor's online, even if that's a ten year process. The situation will be no better in 2011 when the current operating license expires.


The problem with this scenario is we WERE looking at a new reactor, in fact, two of them. The two MAPLE reactors built at Chalk River were supposed to be replacing NRU in 2008. Unfortunately, plans to complete the reactors were scrapped because of cost overruns and design problems. It seems the Canadian nuclear industry can design safe, foolproof reactors for foreign countries, but cannot build anything to meet our own needs. Being one of the very few suppliers for the medical isotopes that NRU provides is a very lucrative business for Canada, but if aren't serious about it, we could lose that business. Or worse, a major accident could happen and put millions of people at risk.