RRFM 2009 Transactions - European Nuclear Society

But the worst crisis developed by end of August 2008. At that time the scheduling of Reactor
operation in Europe was such that after the definitive shutdown of FRJ-II in 2006 and the
required maintenance shutdown of OSIRIS from end of June till 18 th of September, BR2 was
ending its summer cycle by 25 of August the day when the only reactor still available HFR
was scheduled to restart for ensuring the continuity of irradiation. Unfortunately, on the 22 of
August NRG officially indicated that HFR had to cancel the cycle, following the observation
during the in service inspection of an unknown phenomenon: a very small intermittent stream
of bubbles escaping from the wall of the primary cooling system. Later on, following a very
impressive investigation it was foreseen to attempt performing a repair precluding the reactor
restart before mid of February 2009. As a matter of fact the Authorities agreed to restart
cautiously the reactor operation by end February while scheduling to have a few months
shutdown for implementing a more definitive repair. Unfortunately at the same time an
incident developed at IRE when an unforeseen chemical reaction took place during mixing of
liquid waste streams, leading to the release over several days of about 1 Ci iodine 131 in the
environment. Despite the fact that no health impact on workers and population could result
from this incident, it was taken very seriously and the Licensing Authorities did not authorize
the restart of IRE production before mid of November after a through full investigation of the
causes and required preventive actions.
Therefore, beginning of September no reactor was available for both COVIDIEN and IRE. At
the restart of OSIRIS by mid of September, IRE agreed to irradiate its targets and to have
COVIDIEN processing them after the required transfer from one container to the other and
adaptation of the target processing equipment, due to target design differences. In October
COVIDIEN could use both IRE irradiation capacities in BR2 and OSIRIS for increasing its
production, which minimized the shortage resulting from the IRE incident to the loss of only a
few productions.
Although the impact of the crisis was reduced by a very significant contribution of NTP,
boosting its production to a maximum for helping IRE to supply its customers in the frame of
its consortium agreement and that NRU production was also significantly increased for
providing IRE with some back up but also for Nordion contracting direct supply to some
customers. During several months the world market was affected by significant shortage of
Mo supply, less than 50 % in Europe and 80 % in ROW of the demand being satisfied during
some weeks
3. Why such a crisis
The historical development of Mo 99 production gives the root cause of the risk of such crisis
despite several attempts to correct this development leading to the current situation.
In the 60 th , Mo production started in America relying on a network of 2 private reactors in US
and 2 public reactors in Canada.
By end of the 70 th , IRE started Mo production in Europe by calling for irradiation services
from test reactors available within a radius of 800 km (BR2, HFR, OSIRIS, ORPHEE, and
HARWELL).
During the 80 th , the 2 US reactors was definitively shutdown and the world production was
relying only on NORDION (80 %) and IRE.
Beginning of the 90 th , following political decision in Belgium, IRE sold its radiopharmaceutical
business to Nordion and became mainly its subcontractor. Facing the risk of a monopoly
situation Mallinckrodt decided to develop its Mo 99 production facility in Petten and requested
support from IRE which proposed to have a consortium with NTP (SA) for ensuring the best
security of supply.
In the mean time one of the 2 Canadian reactors (NRX) was definitively shutdown as well as
HARWELL and ORPHEE in Europe. Then NORDION succeeded to obtain from AECL the
construction of the 2 MAPLE reactors which should have had by 2000, the capacity of
producing twice the world demand. In front of this new threat of monopoly casted in Nordion
contracts of 10 years exclusivity signed with most of big customers, IRE reacted by obtaining
from European Commission and Japan Fair Trade Commission injunction for Nordion to
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