Bruce Power is quickly becoming one of the world’s largest producers of medical isotopes that fight and detect cancer around the globe – but on Friday the government and nuclear operator announced that they are working together to start processing those medical isotopes within Bruce County instead of shipping them overseas for processing. “We're going to add some facilities either on site or very close to site to process these isotopes, which are coming outside of the reactor. [That means] we can get them into the drug much much faster, and go to the patient as fast as possible,” said Bruce Power CEO and President, Eric Chassard.
The new medical isotope processing facility will be located either right on the Bruce Power site, or in the Bruce Energy Centre near the nuclear plant. This means that instead of shipping the medical isotopes all the way to Germany for processing like they were previously, they’ll be processed within a few hundred metres of where they’re produced. Medical isotope production at Bruce Power nuclear station near Kincardine (Source: Bruce Power) “What this means is that we're saving time - and when you're producing these medical isotopes, that time is money.
And the closer we can get these medical isotopes to people, the more lives we're going to save. So, this is about economic development for sure, it's about health care too. It's about improving the quality of life of tens of thousands of families that are affected by cancer every week,�.
