Overriding the safety concerns of its regulator, the Canadian government is rushing through legislation to reopen a nuclear reactor that produces most of the world's supply of a medically important diagnostic isotope.
Hospitals worldwide have canceled or delayed thousands of nuclear medicine tests because of the prolonged shutdown of the reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, near Ottawa.
Atomic Energy of Canada, the government company that owns the reactor, closed it for regular maintenance on Nov. 18. But inspectors from Canada's nuclear regulatory agency subsequently discovered that the 50-year-old reactor still lacked systems that Atomic Energy was ordered to install to prevent a potentially dangerous reactor failure after a natural disaster like an earthquake.
The legislation, which was pushed through the House of Commons late on Tuesday night, will suspend the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission's oversight of the reactor for 120 days and allow Atomic Energy to restart it immediately. The bill was approved by Canada's unelected Senate on Wednesday night.
"There will be no nuclear accident," Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the House of Commons on Tuesday. "On the contrary, what we do know is that the continuing actions of the Liberal-appointed Nuclear Safety Commission will jeopardize the health and safety and lives of tens of thousands of Canadians."
Neither Harper, nor anyone in his government offered any evidence that the commission, a quasi-judicial body headed by a former public servant, acted for partisan reasons. But to support his safety claim, he cited an eight-paragraph report written by the former chief engineer of Atomic Energy and the former manager of two nuclear power stations built by the company.
In a letter submitted to the government this week, Linda Keen, the president of the safety commission, said the Chalk River reactor, which is known as the National Research Universal, or NRU, had an unusual design that required its cooling-water pumps to operate at all times.
The emergency backup for those pumps, she added, "is essential for the safe operation of the NRU reactor."
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