Most nuclear stations do exactly one thing with a reactor: heat water, spin a turbine, push electricity onto the grid. That is the entire job, and it has been for about seventy years. But one station on the shore of Lake Huron in Ontario found a second use for the same hardware, and it has nothing to do with your power bill.<\/p>\n
Bruce Power runs eight CANDU reactors at the Bruce site, and inside one of them, Unit 7, it breeds a cancer-fighting isotope called lutetium-177 while the reactor is still making power. In October 2022 it became the first commercial nuclear operator in the world to pull that off. The isotope it makes goes into targeted therapies for prostate cancer and neuroendocrine tumors, the kind of treatment designed to hunt malignant cells and leave the healthy tissue around them mostly alone.<\/p>\n
And right now, this month, that side business is sitting in front of Canada’s nuclear regulator. Bruce Power has asked for permission to pull more of the isotope’s supply chain onto its own site instead of shipping every step abroad, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission<\/a> is reviewing that request in a written hearing in July 2026.<\/p>\n The technology doing this is called the Isotope Production System, or IPS. It was designed and built by Isogen, a joint venture between Kinectrics and Framatome, and installed inside Unit 7, an 817-megawatt pressurized heavy-water reactor.<\/p>\n The chemistry is the interesting part. The IPS loads targets made of ytterbium-176 into the reactor core, and the neutron flux inside a running reactor slowly converts that ytterbium into lutetium-177. So the same neutrons that would otherwise just be part of splitting uranium are put to work cooking a medical isotope on the side. The reactor never stops making electricity to do it.<\/p>\n That last detail matters more than it sounds. Bruce Power runs its units around the clock, which means a steady, predictable stream of isotope coming off the same machine that keeps the lights on in a chunk of Ontario. Most medical isotopes have historically come from a small, aging fleet of research reactors, and when one of those goes down for maintenance, the supply gets tight fast. A power reactor running 24\/7 is a very different kind of supplier.<\/p>\n Here is the problem with lutetium-177: it does not keep. The isotope has a half-life of about 6.65 days, which means that from the moment it comes out of the reactor, the clock is running and the material is steadily decaying into something that no longer works as a drug. You cannot make a batch, warehouse it, and ship it whenever it is convenient. Every mile and every day between the reactor and the patient eats into what is left.<\/p>\n That is the whole reason the supply chain is under pressure to get shorter. Today, targets irradiated in Unit 7 need their carrier materials stripped away before the lutetium can move on. Until recently, that stripping work happened at a facility off the Bruce site entirely, one more stop on the journey.<\/p>\n To change that, Bruce Power and Kinectrics built a new made-in-Canada hot cell, a fully shielded enclosure where operators work behind heavy shielding using mechanical arms that mirror their hands, so nobody has to be anywhere near the radiation. It was built at Kinectrics in Etobicoke and shipped to the Bruce site in early 2026, with testing running through the spring ahead of commissioning. Once it is live, the job of cutting open the target and extracting the quartz ampule holding the lutetium happens on site instead of somewhere else.<\/p>\n One thing worth being precise about, because it is easy to overstate: this does not mean Bruce Power is suddenly making finished cancer drugs on the shores of Lake Huron. The ampule still gets packaged and shipped to ITM in Munich, Germany<\/a>, where it is processed into the pharmaceutical-grade material that ends up in treatments. What the hot cell does is pull one more step home and shave time off a chain where time is literally the product decaying.<\/p>\n The hot cell is the near-term move. The bigger ask is the one in front of the CNSC this month.<\/p>\n Bruce Power has applied to change its licensed lutetium-177 production process so it can operate that hot cell at a maintenance facility on the Bruce site under its existing reactor operating licence. In plain regulatory terms, the company wants formal permission to do the target-carrier removal work on site rather than off it, and it asked the Commission to reach a decision quickly to support the program. Chief operating officer James Scongack has framed the goal as getting “cancer-fighting medical isotopes to the global market sooner,” said Bruce Power.<\/p>\n The written hearing pulled in submissions from the usual cast plus one telling addition. Alongside CNSC staff and Kinectrics, the regulator received input from Brightshores Health System, a hospital network. When a healthcare provider files paperwork in a nuclear licensing hearing, it is a decent signal that the people on the receiving end of these isotopes are paying attention to how reliably the supply flows.<\/p>\n None of this is a fight over reactor safety in the way a headline might suggest. It is a paperwork question about where a specific, already-approved task is allowed to happen. But it is the kind of unglamorous approval that decides whether Canada climbs further up the isotope value chain or stays a supplier of raw material that gets finished somewhere else.<\/p>\n The push is not happening in a vacuum, and the dollar figures around it have gotten serious over the past year.<\/p>\n In August 2025, the federal government put $13 million behind a second Isotope Production System, this one going into Unit 6, through a program called the Canadian Medical Isotope Ecosystem. That second IPS does two jobs: it raises long-term production capacity, and it keeps the lutetium flowing when Unit 7 goes offline for its scheduled major overhaul in 2028. Losing your only isotope reactor for a multi-year refurbishment would be a problem. Having a second one already running solves it.<\/p>\n Then, in February 2026, the province stepped in with something bigger. Ontario provided a provincial guarantee, through its Indigenous Opportunities Financing Program<\/a>, to support a $250 million investment expanding the isotope partnership between Bruce Power and the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. The province called it the largest guarantee of its kind since the program began in 2009. Bruce Power operates on Saugeen Ojibway Nation territory, and revenue from the lutetium-177 program flows back into the community through a partnership the two set up years ago.<\/p>\n All of it points at one target the province keeps repeating: doubling Ontario’s medical isotope production by 2030. The market gives them a reason to try. More than 40 million medical procedures a year worldwide use isotopes for diagnosis or treatment, and the global market is projected to grow from roughly $13 billion to more than $45 billion a year over the coming decade, according to figures cited by The Globe and Mail<\/a>.<\/p>\n The noise in nuclear right now mostly goes to new machines. Small modular reactors on conference slides, the 953-tonne basemat Canada just lowered into a shaft at Darlington<\/a>, the endless pitch that the next reactor is a couple of years out. Bruce Power is chasing new build too, and it is running a $13 billion program to refurbish its existing reactors<\/a> and keep them alive into the 2060s.<\/p>\n But the isotope story is a reminder that the reactors already standing can do things the slide decks rarely mention. The CANDU design<\/a> that has powered Ontario for half a century turns out to be a workable neutron source for growing a cancer isotope, and the same heavy-water hardware that boils water for the grid is quietly supplying a treatment to hospitals on the other side of the world.<\/p>\n Whether Canada gets to keep more of that chain at home now comes down to a written hearing and a regulator’s decision, not a crane or a concrete pour. The reactor already does the hard part. The rest is logistics, and a form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most nuclear stations do exactly one thing with a reactor: heat water, spin a turbine, push electricity onto the grid. … <\/p>\nThe reactor has a day job and a side job<\/h2>\n
Why the logistics are a race against the clock<\/h2>\n
What the regulator is weighing right now<\/h2>\n
The money lining up behind it<\/h2>\n
The old reactor doing the new trick<\/h2>\n