On March 31, a little-known part of Canada’s nuclear history will go dark for the last time.
The National Research Universal Reactor — or NRU — at Chalk River, Ontario will be turned off for good Saturday evening. It first came online in 1957.
Retired Atomic Energy of Canada Limited engineer Fred Blackstein was there almost from the start. He got his first job in the lab when he was just 19 years old.
“I sort of think I grew up here. I hope I grew up,” he said.
Blackstein would go on to work in a number of jobs at the reactor, from 1961 to 1985. He said that during those decades, Chalk River was the “place to be if you were a scientist anywhere in the free world.”
Susan Lunn & Sarah Sears – CBC News – March 30, 2018.
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