How are these 4 connected?
Recently there has been an international shortage of nuclear isotopes used for many tests that are used in diagnosing and operating on many diseases, cancer amongst the leading disease.
The international health care industry has relied on a single source for the vast majority of these isotopes. A Canadian nuclear facility.
There was recently a world wide shortage due to the shut down of the facility, and it seems no-one was prepared or understood the linkages and the effects of the interruption of the business.
It's a complicated story, but simply put the players are the ownership group of the facility, the regulatory body to ensure nuclear safety (not a small responsibility!), the government and the health care industry.
The regulator said upgrades were necessary years ago to ensure safe operation, the facility said it was "working" on implementing the upgrades - they apparently never did.
The regulator shut them down for non-compliance, the flow of the isotopes stopped and everyone had a Public Relations nightmare on their hands.
The government was embarrassed, it stepped in and over ruled the regulator, and allowed the facility to restart without the safety upgrades, saying it knew it would be safe. (Interesting to know how they would know and guarantee that, or were they just taking a flyer that nothing would go wrong!).
The reactor fired up and started producing the isotopes.
No one saw the linkage of all these events prior to them happening, or at least no one acted on the knowledge, there was no plan.
What you get is a knee jerk reaction, and potentially compromised nuclear safety with a weakened regulator.
A proper review would have revealed all of these problems in advance and the whole mess could have been averted.
