TANNARA YELLAND
CUP Prairies & Northern Bureau Chief
Florizone, the vice-president of finance and resources at the University of Saskatchewan, has been working on the project for more than a year. While it is still in its first stages, the proposed Canadian Neutron Source has attracted considerable interest from the Canadian scientific community.
The Canadian Institute for Neutron Scattering recently voiced its approval of the project.
“It was really an easy choice,” said Dominic Ryan, CINS president. “There’s nobody else who’s actively offering to build anything. Saskatchewan’s the only game in town and it’s a very good game.”
Ryan stressed the need for a new research reactor in Canada. For the past 50 years, Canadian neutron research has been based out of the National Research Universal Centre in Chalk River, Ont.
The NRU is significantly larger than the proposed CNS, but the CNS would be used specifically for neutron beam research, whereas the NRU is used for a variety of purposes from neutron beam research to the production of medical isotopes.
The NRU is the only research reactor in Canada, making it extremely important to Canada’s ability to conduct research. But Ryan says the NRU “is living on borrowed time and has been for a while.”
The NRU has been inactive for most of the past two years due to a small heavy water leak found in May 2009 that led to a maintenance shutdown for the following 15 months.
If the NRU is permanently shut down — which Florizone said may happen in 2016 — Canada will be without a research reactor. This would be a shame, according to both Florizone and Ryan, because Canada has been a pioneer in this type of research.
Both Ryan and Florizone underscored the value of having a new reactor built near the Canadian Light Source, each describing its value as “synergistic.”
The CLS is Canada’s only synchrotron. Its website explains that a synchrotron is a “source of brilliant light that scientists can use to gather information about the structural and chemical properties of materials at the molecular level.”
Synchrotrons — of which there are only about 40 in the world — emit light from across the spectrum, from X-rays to ultraviolet and infrared, to examine how electrons behave.
Reactors such as the NRU and the proposed CNS use neutrons to look at the behav iour of the nucleus of an atom. With the two technologies at the same site, it would be possible to examine the entirety of a particular sample at the atomic level.
Ryan added that because the neutrons that would be used by the CNS reactor are especially sensitive to light elements like hydrogen, it would be an “ideal probe of organic materials.”
There are still many obstacles and a long wait before the CNS will be operational, though.
“I like to say there are three stages of approval,” Florizone said. “The first stage costs millions of dollars, the second stage costs tens of millions and the final stage costs hundreds of millions. From the first stage to the end is about 10 years.”
The CNS is still in the first stage of approval — it has been proposed and not immediately dismissed. Florizone said the university is in talks with the federal and provincial governments for funding to conduct feasibility studies. These studies comprise the second stage of the project.
The third and costliest stage will be construction. Florizone estimates that if and when the CNS reaches construction it will cost “in the range of $500 million.”
In response to the safety concerns that chronically plague nuclear power and reactors, Ryan said that “modern reactors are inherently safe,” and that this reactor would be almost 100 times smaller than a power-producing reactor.
“There are no real radiation issues even with power reactors, to be honest. A coal-fired power station emits far more radiation as a general rule than any nuclear reactor would ever be allowed to emit.”
There is already a much smaller reactor for plasma research that has been operating safely on the U of S campus for decades.
Ryan and Florizone were both keen to emphasize the importance this reactor would have for the U of S as a science and research institution. There is no other university with both a synchrotron and neutron beam source.
Ryan called the idea that such an institution would exist in Canada “truly spectacular.”