Bruce Power is helping to ensure safe medical treatment in hospitals around the world by providing a special product harvested from Bruce Power's B Unit Nuclear Reactors.
That product, one that many hospitals around the world rely on, is Cobalt-60; used in a number of applications including the sterilization of disposable medical supplies including sutures, syringes, even surgical gowns and masks.
The recent shutdown of and maintenance of Unit 8 at the Bruce B site gave crews the chance to harvest or extract the Cobalt-60 to be packaged and then shipped for processing.
"The Unit 8 is on a planned outage now and that's when we take the opportunity to remove the Cobalt-60 from the reactor and prepare it to send it to Nordion where it eventually gets used for sterilization of medical equipment and a whole host of other applications," says John Peevers, investor and media relations at Bruce Power.
Ottawa based company, Nordion, processes the Cobalt-60 for use in industrial irradiation applications worldwide.
Bruce Power supplies Cobalt-60 to roughly 55 countries worldwide and also provides the world's largest source of Cobalt-60 from its Bruce B Units.
