Chalk River Reactor Shut Down - Worldwide Medical Isotope Production Crippled

[Nehkara]

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

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.

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.

[Dion]

Will this affect someone who needs an MRI?

[Daradon]

^^^ The actual MRI machine uses magnets to image you so I doubt it. However I was wondering, does this closure affect the radioactive dyes they inject into for imaging for many tests?

[Nehkara]

Originally Posted by Dion

Will this affect someone who needs an MRI?

No, MRI uses no radiation. It uses magnetic fields to image.

Originally Posted by Daradon

^^^ The actual MRI machine uses magnets to image you so I doubt it. However I was wondering, does this closure affect the radioactive dyes they inject into for imaging for many tests?

Yes, any radioactive "dyes" will be affected by this.

[BlackArcher101]

Wow, I never knew the industry was so reliant on one supply source. You'd think there would be more in case something happened. More reactors!!! Let's get that one in Alberta going asap! I wish.

[Nehkara]

Originally Posted by BlackArcher101

Wow, I never knew the industry was so reliant on one supply source. You'd think there would be more in case something happened. More reactors!!! Let's get that one in Alberta going asap! I wish.

It is a widespread and chronic problem in Nuclear Medicine. Often times things that are used regularly only have one supplier and if that supplier decides not to make it any more or goes out of business... we don't have it anymore.

Unfortunately I believe that reactors producing medical isotopes cannot produce power because their design is significantly different. This makes reactors of this type rare because their benefit is not high profile or likely to make anyone a lot of money.

[mykalberta]

They should either simply shut down the reactor or refuse to sell these outside of Canada. I highly doubt the sale of these isotopes cover the cost of operation.

[Suave]

Originally Posted by mykalberta

They should either simply shut down the reactor or refuse to sell these outside of Canada. I highly doubt the sale of these isotopes dont cover the cost of operation.

Looking through their financial statements it appears to cost over $160 million to operate the facilities in the R&D division (which is responsible for the Chalk River Site) but it only brings in $41 million in revenue.

[mykalberta]

Then its an easy decision. Shut down the reactor and be done with all the hassles.

After reading more of what the facility is, they should transfer its duties to another reactor.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by mykalberta

Then its an easy decision. Shut down the reactor and be done with all the hassles.

After reading more of what the facility is, they should transfer its duties to another reactor.

That is assuming that any other reactor can do the same thing.

Personally, I think the Alberta government should invest some money into nuclear technology. Start a project to build 2 plants. Thats 10-20 years of work.

[Nehkara]

Originally Posted by mykalberta

They should either simply shut down the reactor or refuse to sell these outside of Canada. I highly doubt the sale of these isotopes cover the cost of operation.

Originally Posted by mykalberta

Then its an easy decision. Shut down the reactor and be done with all the hassles.

After reading more of what the facility is, they should transfer its duties to another reactor.

No offense to you personally MYK because a lot of people don't know much about Nuclear Medicine but these posts show a lot of ignorance.

First of all, as I mentioned in my post above and notably before yours, reactors that produce medical isotopes cannot produce power... but the same is true the other way around. Nuclear Power Plants cannot produce medical isotopes.

Even if the business is run at a loss, Nuclear Medicine is an absolutely unquestionably essential branch of medicine that would cease to exist if Chalk River shut down permanently before a replacement is brought online.

There are assessments of renal function and cardiac function that can only be done by Nuclear Medicine... such as determining the viability of tissue affected by a heart attack so physicians can determine what, if any, benefit there is to restoring blood flow to the tissue; determining if the tissue is simply dormant or if it is truly dead.

You are also talking about eliminating radiation treatment for thyroid cancer and several other types of cancer as well as treatment of hyperthyroidism.

The heart of the matter is that, by and large, Nuclear Medicine is the only diagnostic imaging that can image physiology instead of just anatomy.

The Chalk River reactor is unquestioningly and undeniably essential, despite the fact that it loses money.

If you have any questions about Nuclear Medicine, feel free to ask.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by Nehkara

No offense to you personally MYK because a lot of people don't know much about Nuclear Medicine but these posts show a lot of ignorance.

If you have any questions about Nuclear Medicine, feel free to ask.

I didn't post because I AM ignorent on the subject..maybe a quick lession on how it works?

[Nehkara]

Originally Posted by T@T

I didn't post because I AM ignorent on the subject..maybe a quick lession on how it works?

Absolutely!

If you think of an X-ray, it is passing x-ray beams through your body onto a detector or film to produce an image. This is also called transmission.

Nuclear Medicine uses a gamma camera. We use radionuclides (medical isotopes) that emit gamma energy and we attach them to medications (pharmaceuticals) that go to specific areas of the body or mimic certain functions in the body. The combined material is called a radiopharmaceutical or more simply, a radioactive medication.

That radiopharmaceutical is injected into the patient and it carries out the function of the drug in the body but because it has a radioactive isotope attached to it that is emitting gamma rays, we can see using our gamma camera where it goes in your body.

A gamma camera works much more like a camera than a scanner (x-ray, CT, MRI). Just like a camera collects information via light that goes into the lens, a gamma camera collects information via gamma rays and uses that information to create a picture.

A good example is a bone scan. We use a radiopharmaceutical that is very similar chemically to calcium. When we inject the dose, it goes to places in the body where new bone is being formed (which occurs at all times in all bones in people of all ages). If you have a fracture, the body is trying to heal it so new bone is being formed at an extremely high rate, so more of the radiopharmaceutical goes there and it glows bright on our image.

Fractures that are hard to see on x-rays often take up to 10 days before they show up, finally, on an x-ray. A bone scan can detect such a fracture within 24 hours often and almost always within 72 hours.


Now, back to the matter at hand.

80% of all Nuclear Medicine examinations are done with a single isotope. This isotope is technetium 99m. Chalk River produces molybdenum 99 which is shipped to Nuclear Medicine departments all over North America and elsewhere in the form of generators. Molybdenum 99, through natural radioactive decay, decays to technetium 99m inside the generators, and we draw off the technetium and use it for imaging our patients.

However, Chalk River also produces iodine 131 which is used for thyroid imaging and more importantly, thyroid cancer treatment and hyperthyroidism treatment.


Some pictures:

Gamma Cameras







Bone Scan

[Nehkara]

I have received some good and bad news over the past few days.

Calgary and Edmonton lucked out... apparently the two big cities in Alberta get their isotopes from South Africa and not Chalk River. I have no idea how we are that lucky but its good. However... that doesn't keep the problem of the Chalk River shutdown from affecting Calgary and Edmonton because now every place that used Chalk River will be looking elsewhere and the worldwide supply will come nowhere near the worldwide demand, so shortages will show up everywhere... it just might take a little longer to hit us here.

Now for the bad news - Chalk River might be down much longer than a month. They are having difficulty finding the source of the leak and have not been able to identify any damage on the inside of the reactor vessel. Some rumors put the down time at up to a full year, which would be a complete and utter disaster.... but even more level headed analyses still believe it could be two or three months instead of one.

Source: Chalk River reactor faces long shutdown

[GreenTeaFrapp]

Originally Posted by Nehkara

Calgary and Edmonton lucked out... apparently the two big cities in Alberta get their isotopes from South Africa and not Chalk River. I have no idea how we are that lucky but its good.

I wouldn't call that lucky. I'd call it being unsupportive of Canadian industry!

[Nehkara]

Originally Posted by GreenTeaFrapp

I wouldn't call that lucky. I'd call it being unsupportive of Canadian industry!

I feel that it is both. I don't like it because it IS unsupportive of Canadian industry (most notably, an industry that originated in Canada) but it is also lucky that we, for the moment, have dodged the bullet of the Chalk River shutdown.