The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has given Bruce Power approval to operate the company’s hot cell facility in Tiverton, Ontario, for medical radioisotope processing. This approval allows the facility to conduct Target Carrier Removal (TCR), a key step in the production of lutetium-177, an isotope used to treat prostate and gastric cancers.

The Transformational Challenge Reactor (TCR) program was launched in 2019 to demonstrate that highly improved, efficient systems can be created rapidly by harnessing the major advances in manufacturing, materials, and computational sciences that have emerged since the end of the first nuclear era. The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory leads the TCR program, which includes contributing partners from other DOE national laboratories and the U.S. nuclear industry. The program leverages some of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers and draws from ORNL’s lengthy history, institutional knowledge, and capabilities in high--performance computing, materials science development, advanced manufacturing techniques, and nuclear science and engineering.