aecl

Data contained in a Parliamentary Budget Office report raises questions about the government’s sale of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.

The CBC’s Leslie MacKinnon files a necessary review of the medical isotope situation.

On the agenda this afternoon: Various medical associations, including the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine and the Canadian Association of Radiologists.

From the directive issued to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, following a unanimous vote in the House of Commons (December 10, 2007):

That’s right, after spending the first part of our day watching AECL’s chief financial officer shift uncomfortably under questioning at Government Operations, once more into the breach we plunge, as the Natural Resources committee hears from the embattled nuclear agency’s president, Hugh MacDiarmid, as well as Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission chair Michael Binder. Considering how wildly laudatory the latter was towards the former during his last committee appearance, ITQ isn’t expecting much in the way of apocalyptic  fingerwagging from the nuclear regulator, who definitely doesn’t seem to have any interest in becoming the new Linda Keen.

Tory Minister Lisa Raitt offers to resign. Harper says no.

I swear, it feels like we’ve done this before — only last time, didn’t we have a slightly shorter minister on the hot seat? Anyway, ITQ will be liveblogging this afternoon’s emergency hearing on that whole Chalk River don’t-call-it-a-meltdown, with special guest star Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt, who will appear along with senior bureaucrats from her department – including the same deputy minister as last time, the formidable Cassie Doyle.

ITQ heads over to the National Press Theatre to watch Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt makes it official: She’s selling off shares in the AECL division that actually makes money, at least in theory – and with lots and lots of subsidies — and bringing in outside experts to manage the beleaguered Chalk River unit.

The weekly announcements of yet another new nuclear plant in the works suggest an industry gaining credibility after years of environmental backlash and NIMBYism. The province of Ontario says it will build two nuclear reactors at the Darlington generating station east of Toronto. Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall says his province will be “the Saudi Arabia of uranium for the world”, hopefully without that country’s security concerns. In Manitoba, the town of Pinawa, Man., 180 km northeast of Winnipeg, is in discussions with Atomic Energy of Canada to put a nuclear lab in the town. The site used to have a functioning plant in the 1960s, but it was closed in 1998.

Speaking of the rumoured push to privatize – or PPP-ify, at least – the fiscally-beleagured AECL, guess what minister has been holding regular get-togethers with Bruce Power CEO Duncan Hawthorne since August, including four meetings during the five-week federal election campaign?