I am in Nuclear Medicine technology at SAIT so this announcement this afternoon hits close to home.
In the next few weeks, Nuclear Medicine departments in Canada will likely lose 60-70% of their operating capacity as the medical isotopes required to do the examinations will be unavailable and generally in extremely short supply worldwide.
'Patients will suffer' from Chalk River shutdown: medical imaging industry
Quote:
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) announced Monday that its Chalk River reactor, located about 185 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, will remain out of service for more than a month due to a leak at the base of the reactor vessel.
The agency noticed the heavy water leak on Friday, a day after the reactor was shut down due to a power outage in eastern Ontario and western Quebec. The leak, which also released a small amount of radioactive tritium, was traced to a corroded outer wall of the reactor vessel.
|
Quote:
According to Dr. Jean-Luc Urbain, president of the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine, the reactor supplies about 60 per cent of the medical isotopes in the world, and the countries that will be most affected by the shortage are Canada and the U.S.
Dr. François Lamoureux, another spokesman for the association, expects an 80 per cent reduction in the availability of medical isotopes next week. Medical isotope users must reduce their activities by 60 to 70 per cent as a result of the shortage, he added in French, and that will lead to serious problems concerning accessibility to treatment. The few available will be used only for emergencies, he said, such as diagnosing whether someone may be having a heart attack.
Lamoureux estimated that about 30,000 nuclear medicine diagnostic exams are conducted each week in Canada.
|
I hope some solution to these ongoing problems at Chalk River comes out of this crisis.
If you have questions about this current problem or Nuclear Medicine in general, feel free to ask either here or in PM.