The panel included Vic Pakalnis, president and CEO of Sudbury-based Mirarco, which is involved in the development of the technology to create small modular reactors (SMR); Diane Cameron of Natural Resources Canada; Ryan Blinn of Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh, Pa.; Corey McDaniel of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories in
Chalk River, Ont.; Frank Saunders of Bruce Power in Tiverton, Ont.; and Nathan Tedford from Hatch Ltd., in Mississauga.
This paper describes recovery from the unintended consequences of facility improvements implemented in B320, a building at a Canadian National Laboratory campus near
Chalk River Ontario.
and Canada to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs, this
Chalk River facility experienced numerous serious accidents in the early decades of atomic energy and weapons.
In December 1944, in Washington DC, the Combined Policy Committee gave the go-ahead to build a heavy-water-moderated reactor called NRX at
Chalk River, Ontario.
Jeremy Whitlock is a scientist at AECL
Chalk River Laboratories, and currently manager of Non-Proliferation and Safeguards.
The UK's research was connected to, but separate from, the Manhattan Project in the US, and in 1943 the British team was relocated to
Chalk River, Montreal.
The PCF began when some staff members of the
Chalk River Laboratories moved from Deep River, Ont., to Pinawa, Man., where the Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment of Atomic Energy Canada Limited (later known as Whiteshell Laboratories) was first built.
And in what may amount to a supreme irony, it was our own reactor difficulties in
Chalk River that prompted an unprecedented Canadian interest in medical isotopes.
The Canadian reactor at
Chalk River, Ontario, is slated to reopen in April but production will take several months.
In June, the Prime Minister's chief spokesperson described the company as a "dysfunctional, $30-billion sinkhole." Frustrated by the failure of AECL's MAPLE isotope reactor project and repeated shutdowns of the aging NRU Isotope reactor at
Chalk River, the federal government had already signaled its desire to sell AECL's reactor business.