Bruce Power has completed its most recent harvest of Cobalt-60, which will be used to diagnose and treat brain and breast cancers.
After the medical-grade isotope spent nearly two years in Bruce Power’s Unit 5 reactor, it was harvested during the unit’s ongoing planned maintenance outage.
It will be processed by Ottawa-based Nordion before being made available to the world’s medical community as it develops new ways to diagnose and treat cancer.
“Bruce Power’s ability to produce Cobalt-60 safely and efficiently means that the national and global health-care community doesn’t have to worry about there ever being a shortage of this cancer-fighting isotope,” said Mike Rencheck, Bruce Power’s president and CEO. “We are ensuring a long-term, stable supply of medical isotopes to help advance human health and save lives. “The partnerships we have announced this summer with Nordion, Xcision, Kinectrics, Framatome and the Saugeen Ojibway Nation not only reflect our commitment to producing existing isotopes but to finding new medical isotopes to produce in our reactors and hopefully treat other forms of cancer in the future.”
One of the members of that community, Xcision – a U.S.-based medical technology company – is using Cobalt-60 for the GammaPod, a stereotactic radiotherapy system for the treatment of breast cancer. Bruce Power announced earlier this week that it was entering into a collaborative framework to support the use of Cobalt-60 and the GammaPod.
