A second production line was recently completed in Bruce Power's Unit 7 reactor, doubling its capability to produce medical isotopes.
According to Bruce Power, the new line means the plant can now produce about 400,000 lutetium-177 isotopes a year.
President and CEO Eric Chassard said the new line will help get these life-saving isotopes to more people across the globe.
"Something that was before, extremely expensive and hard to get, is now flowing," he said. "That's the beauty of having this type of system in a commercial reactor.
On Friday, Bruce Power announced plans to build a hot cell facility, so the lutetium-177 isotopes can be processed in Ontario rather than overseas.
Chassard said that's just one of many steps the company is taking to increase its contributions to the fight against cancer. He said Bruce Power has submit an amendment to its operating licence, which would allow it to test more medical isotopes.
"We are submitting to the CNSC (Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission), a bonding case so that we can put almost any type of isotope we want inside the reactor, and accelerate the research and development of new isotopes. There is a huge backlog and so we can go accelerate and go through this backlog very fast and guess what? When you test, you find."
Currently, Bruce Power needs to submit a licence for each isotope it wants to produce.
Chassard says they'll soon start setting up different reactors to produce the isotopes, so that the process can continue during scheduled refurbishments over the next decade.
"What's going to happen when we refurbish Unit 7? One year before, we're going to add a production system on Unit 6, by 2027, so that we are ready when we shut down Unit 7 in 2028. Then we're going to keep going by expanding the system on Unit 3, so that we have both Bruce A and Bruce B producing."
The Unit 4 reactor is scheduled to begin its Major Component Replacement in February 2025.