Repairs at the facility in Chalk River, Ontario, have choked off the global supply of radioactive isotopes used for diagnosing and treating thousands of patients with cancer and other diseases. On the 18th Nov., the reactor was taken offline to repair the electrical system; it was supposed to restart on the 23rd Nov., but is still shut down.

“There is only one reactor on the North American continent that actually supplies most of these agents,” Dr. Christopher O’Brien, president of the Ontario Association of Nuclear Medicine, told the Toronto Star. “Last week, I guess you could describe it as struggling. This week it’s devastating, and next week potentially catastrophic,”

The problem is, these radioactive agents have a shelf life from two weeks to only six hours. “You can’t stockpile it,” said O’Brien. “Basically what we are doing now in Ontario is rationalising services or not offering them.”

Dr. Sandy McEwan, chair of Edmonton’s Cross Cancer Institute and president of the U.S.-based Society of Nuclear Medicine, says that Canada supplies more than two-thirds of the global market for radioactive isotopes.

The conclusion of scientists at the recent Symposium of Desalination and Water Re-use in Trombay, India, was that nuclear power is the only technology presently available which can provide the freshwater that a growing world population will need, without depleting fossil energy resources, according to the International Journal of Nuclear Desalination.

B.M. Misra, the co-editor of the Journal, notes that 3.5 billion people are predicted to face severe water shortages by the year 2025 because the supposedly cost-effective solar, wind, and wave power approaches to desalination “are not viable” for large-scale freshwater production.

In his preface to the issue, P.K. Terawi from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) wrote that “Water-borne diseases cost the Indian economy 73 million working days a year,” and “many of these diseases can be prevented by safe drinking water.” He also noted that two million children now die a year from water-borne diseases, and that more than half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients with these diseases.

S.S. Verma, of the Department of Physics at SLIET in Punjab, reported that small floating nuclear plants could be sited off-shore near densely populated coastal areas, to provide cheap electricity while powering a desalination plant with their excess heat. “Companies are already in the process of developing a special desalination platform for attachment to Floating Nuclear Power Plants,” he said.

Another new approach reported by A. Raha and colleagues at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre is to use Low-Temperature Evaporation for desalination, which could make use of low-pressure steam or low-quality waste heat from a nuclear power plant. Safety, reliability, and viable economics have already been demonstrated, Raha said, and BARC recently commissioned a low-temperature desalination plant to produce 50 tons per day of freshwater.