Weapons-grade uranium OK’d for final road trip to Chalk River

OTTAWA— The United States has approved what is expected to be the last shipment of weapons-grade uranium to be sent to Canada for the production of medical isotopes.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission signed an export licence June 23 to transport 8.1kilograms of highly enriched uranium from Oak Ridge, Tenn., along a secret route to Chalk River, Ont., by the end of this year.

There, for what is expected to be the last time, the uranium will be used to produce target material for the aging National Research Universal (NRU) reactor to irradiate in order to produce medical isotopes used in nuclear medicine.

“The game is over for Canada’s unnecessary and irresponsible use of bomb-grade uranium to produce medical isotopes. Better late than never,” Alan Kuperman, co-ordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement Monday.

Kuperman has long been tracking the controversial U.S. exports of highly enriched uranium to Canada.

The Conservative government has committed to shutting down the routine production of medical isotopes at the NRU by Oct. 31, 2016.

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories Ltd., the subsidiary of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited that operates the NRU, will keep the reactor on standby until March 2018 in case of unexpected shortages in global supply.

CNL did not respond to requests from the Star for comment.

The shutdown includes the possibility of the NRU retaining licences to operate until March 2018 in case of unexpected shortages.

The isotope has a very short lifespan, causing it to disappear within a day of being generated and so it cannot be stockpiled.

Kuperman said that based on his analysis of past usage, the newly approved shipment should last until production shuts down.

The shipment of highly enriched uranium north of the border has long been controversial, with anti-proliferation critics urging the U.S., which was always largely dependent on the Canadian supply of medical isotopes, to pressure Canada to convert to low-enriched uranium, which is safer.

The shipment of highly enriched uranium north of the border has long been controversial

Kuperman said Canada reneged on a pledge to convert to low-enriched uranium made in the 1990s — when it first announced its failed plan to build two new reactors that would have replaced the NRU.

Kuperman said “it’s almost fateful” that, with the pending closure of the NRU, Canada is finally abandoning highly enriched uranium.

The Chalk River reactor, which began operating in 1957, is one of five major producers of molybdenum-99, which decays into the technetium-99m isotope used in 85 per cent of nuclear medicine procedures such as bone scans and other diagnostic tests.

The other reactors, in Australia, South Africa, Belgium and the Netherlands, have either already begun, or will soon begin, using only lowenriched uranium.

“Canada is the only one of the big producers that did not commit or make efforts to convert its reactor-based production from (highly enriched uranium) to (low-enriched uranium),” Kuperman said.

Other sources, such as a cyclotron operated by TRIUMF, Canada’s national nuclear laboratory for particle and nuclear physics at the University of British Columbia, are in the works, but even that project would produce only about 20 per cent of the Canadian supply.

“We remain really quite concerned about the medical isotopes supply,” said Dr. Andrew Ross, president of the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine.