One day, this could all be ours

We'd sure hate to miss out on the chance to have stories like this coming from Saskatchewan's largest city:

AECL officials said Wednesday the Chalk River leak itself is a tremendously challenging engineering problem.

For one thing, it is at the bottom of the tank nine metres below the nearest access point and that access point is nothing but a small hole just 12 centimetres in diameter. AECL must design special tools that can squeeze through that access point and then navigate to the bottom of the reactor vessel — a vessel filled with a tangle of tubes, wires, and the reactor core itself — and then complete a tricky welding and repair job in a highly radioactive, dangerous environment.

The cone shaped vessel that houses the reactor's core is about 3.5 metres tall and 3.5 metres in diameter. The vessel itself is encased in a larger structure.

"I've heard it described as . . . trying to change the oil in your car from your living room," said David Cox, the director of the NRU repair project. "We're faced with conducting remote investigations in a radioactive environment with high radiation fields, conducting the examinations and inspections through small openings in the top of the reactor and accessing, over great distances. So it's technically challenging."

And all this with a minister responsible agitating to get the unit back in service as quickly as possible even though it's already had to be shut down twice in a year and a half.

In fairness, of course, that's not the only possible outcome: a new isotope reactor could just flat out be unfit for service to begin with after a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away. So what's not to like?