In the economic boom of the 1950s, Canada made a strategic gamble on its industrial future: it invested in developing the CANDU nuclear reactor. The CANDU was invented as a conscious decision to differentiate a product from its competition. Why…
Category: Gamma rays
Efficiency and symbolism in Canadian health care and medicine exports
In three and a half years, the operating license of the National Research Universal (NRU) nuclear reactor at Chalk River will expire. The NRU is a hugely important piece of research equipment, arguably Canada’s most important and certainly among its…
Atomic Energy Canada: the biggest applied R&D payoff in Canada’s history
In the wake of last week’s federal budget, Canadian newspapers have been publishing a lot of material on the current government’s approach to research and development funding. I am a professional practitioner in this space: over the past half decade…
Gamma radiation: the “short light” that creates, and protects, life
Gamma rays, also known as gamma photons, are a shorter-wavelength version of visible light. Visible light, or photons that our eyes can detect, has a wavelength of 380 to 700 nanometers (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). Gamma photons…
Nuclear medicine in Northern Ontario: another spinoff benefit from the CANDU program
Bruce Power, by far Canada’s single largest electricity generating plant, is also the biggest clean energy centre in the western hemisphere. The plant’s eight CANDU nuclear generating units are capable of cranking out 50 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year.…