Safety agency demands answers over AECL violation that caused isotope drought

Installing an emergency power system connected to cooling pumps was clearly part of the licence the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission issued to Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. to its 50-year-old unit in Chalk River, Ont., said Barclay Howden, a director general with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

The licence for the AECL reactor at Chalk River, 180 kilometres from Ottawa, was issued last year based on company assurances that the system had in fact been installed.

The non-compliance was uncovered by safety regulators during an inspection last month when AECL took down the reactor for what was supposed to have been five days of routine maintenance.

"It was a surprise to us because our expectation was that it was in place and in service," Howden told The Canadian Press. "From a nuclear safety point of view, this is a very serious situation."

On Thursday, amid a deepening crisis facing medical facilities and patients across the continent, AECL told a commission tribunal that it hadn't realized the power-system upgrade was compulsory, but couldn't explain the oversight.

"We are doing our root-cause analysis of the situation and we will have the answers to the comments and concerns that were raised," AECL spokesman Dale Coffin said Friday.

"We take (the CNSC's) comments very seriously."

AECL's analysis was expected to be sent to the commission by the end of the month.

Howden said the safety agency planned to scrutinize the report to see if there were systemic issues that could point to an even bigger problem with licence compliance.

"As far as we can tell, AECL never provided us on-purpose misleading information, but it appears they did not understand their licensing basis."

Howden said it was his first experience with such an important safety issue.

"I would say this is very prominent," he said.

Greenpeace Canada called the situation "scandalous."

"It raises questions about public safety and environmental protection," said the group's energy campaigner, Sean-Patrick Stensil.

The shutdown of the NRU reactor, now expected to last into January, has crippled MDS Nordion, which is one of the world's largest suppliers of medical isotopes - used for testing millions of people around the world for cancer and other diseases.

In Ottawa, the political opposition accused the government of being negligent and of failing to grasp the seriousness of the situation.

"This is an emergency; people can die," said Liberal MP Hedy Fry.

"And when you ask the questions, they say, 'Oh, but we could do nothing,' and we know that they could."

Steven Fletcher, parliamentary secretary to Health Minister Tony Clement, said the Conservative government was taking action.

"We are looking into alternative supplies in other countries. We are ready to fast track those sources," Fletcher told the House of Commons.

Coffin said AECL was "making progress" in getting the reactor up and running.

Because of the isotope shortage, Howden said safety inspectors were onsite at Chalk River watching the upgrade process to try to make the start-up approval process as quick as possible.

The agency was also fast-tracking approvals for the import of isotopes and amended licences to help alleviate the shortage.

The nuclear medicine community has been in an uproar over what it sees as abysmal lack of information about the outage, with many doctors saying they had little idea of the problem until their supplies started to dwindle.

Once part of AECL, MDS Nordion was privatized in 1991 but remains heavily dependent on its former owner for molybdenum it processes into medical isotopes.

As part of that deal and following years of litigation, AECL assumed full responsibility early last year for building two replacement reactors, which are now years behind schedule and are running over budget by at least $160 million.