MP Gallant Promotes Chalk River Laboratories on Fact-finding Tour of Major US National Lab

February 26, 2010

Photo; Dr. Paul Kearns, Cheryl Gallant, MP, Dr. Thom Mason, Bill Stairs, onsite at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA.


MP Sees Oak Ridge National Lab as a Model for Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories

Oak Ridge, Tennessee… Cheryl Gallant MP, Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke recently was the guest of Dr. Thomas Mason, Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

“Dr. Mason, a distinguished Canadian in the scientific community, who was educated at Dalhousie and McMaster Universities, is one of the reasons why developing a national Lab at Chalk River is so important for the national interest,” stated Cheryl Gallant, MP. “Dr. Mason was part of the ‘brain drain,’ the exodus of professionals from Canada, that occurred under the old liberal government.”

“It was an honour and a privilege for me, as the MP whose riding includes the Chalk River Laboratories, to recommend Dr. Thomas Mason to serve on the Expert Review Panel on Medical Isotope Production. The panel recently presented its report to the Minister of Natural Resources. That report, and the one prepared by our local taskforce of Chalk River current and former employees I struck last summer is under active consideration by our government,” confirmed MP Cheryl Gallant.

“I find it very unfortunate that the Opposition in Ottawa is purposely trying to confuse the issue of medical isotope production with the need to build a new, multi-purpose research reactor as the centre-piece of a new, national laboratory,” remarked MP Gallant. “In the same way, confusing the restructuring of AECL with the vision that I share with our local ‘CREATE’ committee; (Chalk River Employees Ad Hoc TaskforcE for a national laboratory), does a disservice to the women and men working at the Chalk River facility.

“While it cannot be expected that lawyers from Toronto would understand local issues, there are too many jobs at stake to be making ill-informed comments about something they do not understand. While a new multi-purpose research reactor would be capable of producing isotopes just like the existing NRU, our focus is on scientific research, to help develop the new discoveries critical to the future competitiveness of the Canadian economy,” concluded Cheryl Gallant, MP.   

ORNL, in addition to being home to the recently completed $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source, is home to the world’s most powerful open science super computer, the “Jaguar.” This computer has broken the “petaflop’ barrier by being capable of an incredible 1600 trillion calculations per second, making it possible to model the most complex  scientific problems.