Qualla: Chalk River Laboratories

Chalk River Laboratories: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The press conference took place in Ottawa on August 13, 1945, exactly one week after Hiroshima. In the office of Member of Parliament C. D. Howe, flanked by physicists and engineers including the future Nobel laureate John Cockcroft, Canada revealed to the world what had been taking shape in the Ottawa Valley forest: a pilot plant for the production of atomic bomb materials. The facility at Chalk River, tucked among the pines northwest of Ottawa near the small town of Deep River, would go on to live several lives over the next eight decades, from weapons production to peaceful energy research, from medical isotope lifeline to nuclear accident site, and eventually to a proving ground for the reactors of tomorrow.

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Chalk River Laboratories: From Plutonium to Peaceful Purpose

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Chalk River project centred on the NRX reactor, which provided the fission process needed to convert Uranium-238 into Plutonium-239 in the fuel rods. By spring 1950, the extraction plant was pulling 50 grams of plutonium per week from thorium-loaded tubes surrounding the fuel...

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Chalk River Laboratories: Twelve Minutes in December

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On December 12, 1952, the NRX reactor experienced a power excursion and partial loss of coolant. Mechanical failures compounded human errors: control rods could not be lowered into the core, and three rods that did not reach their destination were pulled back out by accident. The...

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Chalk River Laboratories: The Isotope Lifeline

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For decades, Chalk River's reactors produced something the world depended on far more than weapons-grade material: medical radioisotopes. At its peak, the facility generated roughly one-third of the global supply and half the North American supply of isotopes used in diagnostic i...

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Chalk River Laboratories: Nobel Minds and the CANDU Legacy

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Chalk River's contributions extended well beyond isotope production. Bertram Brockhouse conducted his pioneering work in neutron spectroscopy at CRL from 1950 to 1962, research that earned him the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics while he was a professor at McMaster University. Sir Jo...

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Chalk River Laboratories: The Next Chapter in the Forest

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The NRU reactor was shut down for the last time at 7 p.m. on March 31, 2018, entering a state of storage ahead of decommissioning. But Chalk River is far from finished. In 2016, the Canadian government allocated 1.2 billion dollars over ten years to decommission 120 aging buildin...

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