Status Report - NRU Reactor returned to service

Chalk River, 2009 February 17 — Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) reports that the NRU reactor was safely returned to service early in the afternoon on Tuesday, February 17^th, following an unscheduled outage to repair the mechanism to extract medical isotope rods from the reactor.

Production of medical isotopes was maintained throughout the unscheduled outage, however, production yields will be at a reduced level for the next four days. AECL estimates that the supply of medical isotopes to be delivered to MDS Nordion this week will be approximately 2500 curies, about six times the average weekly demand for the Canadian market.

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Contact:
Dale Coffin
Director, Corporate Communications
AECL
Tel: 905-403-7457