Canada’s Globe and Mail indulges in an orgy of self-flagellation today with a front-page piece entitled ‘How Canada let the world down’.
The hand-wringing is over the worldwide shortage of medical isotopes – the radioactive elements injected into patients during medical imaging procedures.
Nature has been following this story ever since the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor located in Chalk River, Ontario, was shut down on 18 November 2007 for maintenance. It’s been on and off ever since, causing patient procedures to be delayed or canceled and raising the prices of remaining isotope supplies. The Globe has doggedly followed every single twist and turn of this sorry tale – dwindling supplies, soaring costs, potential brain drain …
Chalk River was expected to reopen late 2009, but the latest news is that it will remain shut until spring 2010 (Reuters).
The supply crisis is particularly bad because the High Flux Reactor in Petten, the Netherland, is also offline. Together, the reactors produce two-thirds of the global supply of molybdenum-99, which decays to form technetium-99m, an isotope that is used in about 70,000 medical imaging procedures worldwide every day.
The Globe now says:
Canada, relied upon as a leader in isotope production, is seen as having reneged on its responsibility to the medical world…By failing to plan for or respond quickly to the failure of a reactor at the end of its lifespan, Canada is going back on its “implied contract” to provide scarce and much-needed medical isotopes, said Robert Atcher, president of the international Society of Nuclear Medicine.
Doctors and researchers are now beginning to think that the reactor will never come back online, the Globe adds.
The thing to remember about this crisis, as we pointed out back in July, is that:
The Canadian government has so far resisted calls to switch on two Multipurpose Applied Physics Lattice Experiment (MAPLE) reactors, built at the Chalk River site to replace the 52-year-old National Research Universal reactor. The MAPLE reactors were to be the first nuclear reactors in the world dedicated to production of medical isotopes, but are lying dormant after Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) halted development in May 2008, citing safety issues that it claimed it would be too expensive to resolve. If started up, these reactors alone could deliver more than the current global requirement for medical isotopes, according to Harold Smith, who was a manager on the MAPLE project.
Little wonder that the Globe, along with researchers and medics, are demanding a restart of the MAPLE project.
But AECL insists that the new facilities have major problems to be worked out that could take five or six years.
The result: deadlock. An expert panel, charged with coming up with a solution, is due to report by 30 November.(Globe&Mail)
Meanwhile, the crisis continues.