Canada’s Bruce Power and its partners in the production of medical isotopes have committed to building a hot cell facility in Bruce County to expedite their ability to process short-lived lutetium-177 used in the treatment of cancer. Ontario Minister of Energy & Electrification, Stephen Lecce, announced the decision during a visit to the Bruce Power site.
“This year, more than 247,000 Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer, and one of the most consequential tools doctors have available to diagnose and treat this disease will come from Ontario’s nuclear generating stations – life-saving medical isotopes,” Lecce said.
Production of lutetium-177 began at Bruce NPP in 2022 through an international collaboration between Bruce Power, Isogen (a Kinectrics and Framatome company) and ITM Isotope Technologies Munich. This was the culmination of a multi-year project to install a novel Isotope Production System (IPS) in Bruce Power’s unit 7. This marked the first-of-its-kind achievement of a commercial power reactor with additional capability to commercially produce short-lived medical isotopes.
The IPS enables industrial-scale production of lutetium-177. It irradiates ytterbium-176 to produce lutetium-177, which is then transported to ITM’s manufacturing facility in Germany for processing of pharmaceutical-grade, non-carrier-added lutetium-177 (n.c.a. lutetium-177). ITM is a supplier of n.c.a. lutetium-177 to health care facilities around the world.
The hot cell will allow initial processing of the lutetium-177, produced in Bruce Power’s unit 7 reactor. Once targets are extracted, they have to be safely packaged, shipped, processed and administered to the patient within two weeks for the product to be viable. The new facility will allow for increased amounts of lutetium-177 and reduce process time overall. “This commitment to build a hot cell will help to get the vital cancer-fighting medical isotopes to the patients that need them, when they need them,” said John D’Angelo, President of Isogen. “Our partnership continues to innovate to ensure there’s a steady, reliable supply of medical isotopes at a time when demand from the world health care community is growing.”
The new hot cell will play a key role as the partnership explores the possibility of producing other medical isotopes and expands its IPS to other units in the future. “The exciting part of this is that when we have all of the infrastructure in place with our IPS and the new hot cell fully operational, the sky is the limit on our production and research of new medical isotopes for doctors and patients around the world, allowing a breakthrough in cancer treatment,” said Eric Chassard, Bruce Power’s President & CEO.
Lecce also revealed the start date for the Major Component Replacement (MCR) Outage of Bruce Power’s unit 4. The outage will begin on 1 February 2025, with Bruce Power and its partners doubling the construction activities on site.
The MCR project began in January 2020. The eight pressurised heavy-water Candu reactor units at the Bruce site in Ontario (Bruce A – units 1-4, and Bruce B – units 4-8) began commercial operation between 1977 and 1987. Bruce Power’s CAD13bn ($10bn) Life Extension Programme, which includes Asset Management and MCR, began in 2016. MCR, which began with unit 6 and also includes units 3-8, will extend the life of the site until 2064. Units 1&2 have already been refurbished and were returned to service in 2012. Work began on unit 3 in March 2023. Unit 6 was taken offline for the refurbishment in January 2020 and was returned to service in 2023. Bruce Power is now in the final stages of preparation for the unit 4 MCR outage, with units 5, 7 and 8 slated for refurbishment over the next 10 years.
Bruce Power said that, in 2025 alone, it will invest CAD3bn in Ontario through MCR and Asset Management investments, and the start of unit 4 MCR will double the construction activities on site. “In terms of number of activities per day, no utility has ever taken on a project of this magnitude on an operating site”, the company said.
