reactorscanada

“….. It’s passed on. This reactor is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. It’s a stiff, bereft of life, it rests in peace.  ……it should be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It’s an ex-reactor!”

Monty Python’s Parrot Sketch is so well loved that it will survive any amount of bowdlerizing by me.  It also serves very well to drive the point home that the ACR is well and truly gone. The only reason for this post is that readers of this blog still seem to have a great interest in the ACR.

It’s no exaggeration to say many in Canada’s nuclear community were relieved to see it die. It combined the worst of both the CANDU and light water reactor worlds but fortunately was only a paper concept.  In fact the general feeling in the last few years of AECL’s reactor division was that the ACR’s only value was employing the people working on it. Otherwise it was an embarrassment they didn’t know how to kill. As I predicted SNC-Lavalin did indeed throw it under the bus and its demise was unlamented except of course in human terms because of job losses. One hopes that most of those laid off were able to find other nuclear positions.

The ACR exists only on the internet and, unlike the few twitches that came after the termination of the Maple reactor program, there is no thought whatever of resuscitating it.