Originally Posted by Fiordland

As a side note, the prompt delivery of radioactive cargo is vital to public health.

Technetium 99 generators are used in hospitals all over the country. The generators usually need to be replaced with new ones once or twice a week. These are used in nuclear medicine for cardiac imaging among other things.

Not certain if it is still true, it has been a few years since I have been involved, however at the time some of the cargo airlines and Air Canada were the only airlines setup to handle this cargo. WestJet at the time was not able to handle it for some reason.

The traditional supply chain started with extracting the material from the core of a reactor in Chalk River, running down to processing facility in Ottawa, flown off to Boston for packaging into generators then shipped to hospitals all over the world including back in Canada. There is a group in Saskatoon that has been working on using linear accelerators to produce the material instead of using a reactor. Either way very short half-life and air transport is critical.