Canwest News Service has learned that some current and former nuclear engineers are quietly pushing a plan to reactivate a backup project for the NRU, a project shelved last year by AECL with the backing of Raitt's predecessor Gary Lunn.
In the 1980s, AECL began building two new reactors — MAPLE-1 and MAPLE-2 — next door to the NRU at Chalk River and were to have put them into service in 2000, allowing the NRU to be permanently retired. But last year, with construction of the MAPLEs seven years behind schedule, hundreds of millions of dollars over budget, and with no apparent prospects of sorting out a technical problem that prevented the federal nuclear regulator from certifying them as safe, AECL cancelled the project with Lunn's backing.
Raitt, who had not yet been elected an MP at the time, said she stands by Lunn's decision.
“We are not considering resurrecting this project which, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent, continued to be crippled with irresolvable technical impediments, was eight years behind schedule, experienced serious licensing challenges, and had never produced a single medical isotope,” she said.
But two sources, both of them nuclear engineers who have worked on the NRU and the MAPLEs, say the MAPLEs are perfectly capable of safely producing isotopes and that Raitt ought to “persuade” the CNSC to take another look the project.
“I think there's a way out of this but the way out is that CNSC would have to relent on the safety requirements and that's a tall order,” said a former Chalk River engineer who is now a risk management expert for the federal government and asked not to be identified. “But maybe we'll have to get that in order to avert a major crisis.” [The whole story]
The problem with the MAPLE reactors is somewhat more than a 'technical problem' – it is a fundamental design flaw that caused the reactor to have a positive rather than a negative power coefficient. There's a pretty good explanation of this here:
This in and of itself shouldn't be a problem (although it was at Chernobyl), except that the MAPLES were designed to have a negative power coefficient. The fact that it surprised them should give everyone pause, and makes me extremely uncomfortable with the idea of doing an end-run around the safety regs.
I much prefer the suggestion of the people quoted in this article: swap out the reactor cores with a more conventional design. After all, the building, the control room, the processing facilities, etc. are already built.
Or would that make too much sense?