Field of Science

Another need for nuclear energy

This is what happens when there is inertia towards construction of reactors for peaceful purposes:
"Hospitals across North America have been forced to cancel tests for cancer and heart disease because the unexpected closure of a Canadian nuclear reactor has led to a sudden shortage of medical isotopes.

The 50-year-old National Research Universal (NRU) reactor located in Chalk River, Ontario, was shut down on 18 November for scheduled maintenance and was due back online by mid-December. But Atomic Energy Canada, which owns and operates the facility, extended the outage to install safety-related equipment, including upgrades to the reactor cooling pumps. The reactor supplies about 60% of the molybdenum isotopes used in medical applications globally, including molybdenum-99, which decays into technetium-99m and is used in about 16 million nuclear medicine procedures annually in the United States...The shortage has reignited a discussion over securing the US supply of medical isotopes by building a reactor in the United States."
Again, there's no sense if the debate about nuclear weapons and terrorist attacks is regularly conflated with peaceful and necessary uses of nuclear energy.

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