The Isotope Fiasco and the Future of Nuclear

Prime Minister Harper now faces a difficult choice: the heavy political costs of managing a nuclear program or the environmental consequences of shutting it down.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Thursday that Canada is getting out of the medical isotope business. The implications of the decision, which appears to be motivated primarily by a desire to avoid further political embarrassment, go beyond the confines of the country's health-care system. It also hints at some tough times ahead for those responsible for overseeing the world's nuclear industries.

Until recently, Canada produced close to 40 per cent of the world's supply of molybdenum-99, a radioactive isotope that decays quickly to technetium-99, which is widely used to help diagnose cancers. A heavy-water leak at the sole reactor involved in producing the isotope forced a shutdown a few months back, and there is serious doubt that technicians can get the thing back online in the three months the government says it will take. Even if the reactor can be repaired, Harper says he wants to shut down the entire program by 2016. So the world's medical labs will have to find alternative sources.

That's bad enough, seeing as Harper had no concern about the future of the medical isotope program until his minister of natural resources was caught describing the shut-down and resulting global shortage as a "sexy" story that could be used to political advantage. Rather than try to manage the problem for the next few months, he appears to have chosen to try to sweep it all under the rug.

But this won't be the last time a politician has to weigh the heavy political and economic costs of managing a nuclear program against the energy and environmental consequences of shutting it down.

The Canadian radioisotope-generating reactor at issue differs in many ways from power reactors. It uses heavy water, instead of regular water, as moderator and coolant. It's also a lot smaller and less powerful than anything used to produce electricity. And it's 50-some years old.

That explains the leak. But in the coming years, a lot of reactors around the world are going to be coming up on the end of their lifespan. Owners and regulators will have to decide whether to extend the permitted lifespan or approve decommissioning. Extending the life of a reactor will increase the risk of problems, and therefore maintenance and repair costs. But shutting down a reactor that supplies several hundred megawatts of electricity at a time when demand for clean, non-greenhouse-gas-emitting sources of electricity is rising fast will not be a particularly attractive option.

As anyone who engages the public on energy and climate issues can attest, it's impossible to ignore the nuclear issue. It's relatively easy to make a case against the construction of new reactors on economic grounds. These days it costs at least $7 billion to build a 1-GW reactor, and possibly much more. Plus, they tend to take 10 or 15 years to site, commission, build, and get online. There's a reason why there hasn't been a new nuclear reactor ordered in the U.S. for more than 30 years. Utilities need regulatory and market certainty to build big, expensive power plants, and that simply doesn't exist right now. Not while we're debating climate bills and not when renewable alternatives like solar and wind are growing at double-digit rates each year.

But there's no denying the attraction of nuclear power on environmental grounds. If one can overlook the costs of mining and the challenge of what to do with the waste, it makes an awful lot of sense to take advantage of a technology with a much lower (though not zero) carbon footprint. Compared to coal and oil, nuclear wins hands down. There's simply nothing to be gained from shutting down a reactor unless you really need to on safety grounds.

The problem, according to one survey, is that it will take 338 new reactors to replace the ones scheduled to be taken offline over the next 20 years. Unless the reactor-construction business expands dramatically, there's no way that's going to happen.

So that leaves those in charge facing the realization that trying to keep existing reactors going as long as possible is the least-bad option. And that means there will be breakdowns. And sooner or later, release of radioactivity to the immediate environs will occur. Politicians won't like that. But unless we can learn to reduce our demand for electricity – it's expected to grow by 44 per cent by 2030 – there's no way around the need to keep as many nukes running as we can.

Of course, there are plenty of off-the-shelf technologies that can help cut consumption. The Rocky Mountain Institute estimates they could chop our need for electricity in half. And if we can hike our efficiency rates, renewables should have no trouble meeting all our electricity needs, by 2050 or so. But transforming the world's electricity infrastructure can't be done overnight. You can only build windmills and solar plants so fast. So for the next couple of decades, how we handle our aging reactors will be, well ... critical.