OTTAWA (AP) _ Canada's former nuclear safety watchdog says the latest Chalk River reactor shutdown is far worse than the one she was fired over.

This time around, no one knows how long the aging Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. reactor will be down, Linda Keen said Tuesday.

"This time, it's worse because they're indefinite about the corrosion, they're indefinite about the leaks, and it's very unclear as to how they're going to get it back on," she said in an interview.

"This isn't a regulatory problem. This is a problem of an old reactor."

Keen was head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission during a 2007 shutdown.

At that time, she said, the ill-fated MAPLE project _ which would have replaced the Chalk River reactor _ was still very much alive.

But AECL scrapped two MAPLE reactors last year due to design flaws. They were millions over budget and years behind schedule.

So it still falls to the 52-year-old National Research Universal reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, to provide over half the global supply of medical isotopes used to detect cancer and heart ailments.

That reactor was shut down May 15 after inspectors found a heavy-water leak inside the facility _ its second major shutdown in less than two years.

Officials say the reactor will be down for more than a month _ and possibly much longer.

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Canadian astronaut admits there may be surprises during lengthy space trip

MONTREAL (AP) _ Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk admits there may be a few surprises waiting for him and his fellow space travelers during their six-month visit to the International Space Station.

Thirsk, Russia's Roman Romanenko and Belgium's Frank De Winne will soar into orbit Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz spacecraft.

It's the first time a Canadian astronaut has gone into space on board a Soyuz. In the past, Canadians have been given a lift in American space shuttles.

The 55-year-old Thirsk, who was born in New Westminster British Columbia, is excited about flying in the Soyuz, which was first launched in the 1960s.

His TMA-15 capsule is expected to dock with the space station about two days later and their arrival will double the population of the station to six, the biggest crew yet on the space station.

The giant space lab's current inhabitants are Russia's Gennady Padalka, American Michael Barratt and Japan's Koichi Wakata.

"One of our goals, with our three colleagues on orbit, is to prove that the station can support six people for a long duration," Thirsk said in a pre-launch news conference Tuesday.

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Lots of announcements, but little money flows in federal stimulus

OTTAWA (AP) _ Few shovels have hit the ground in urgent construction work the federal government promised four months ago to help goose Canada's ailing economy, a survey shows.

The Canadian Press examined a group key infrastructure projects, worth $462 million this year, that were outlined in January's deficit-laden federal budget.

The projects _ mostly bridges, railways, border crossings and harbors _ are all within federal jurisdiction. They do not require matching funds from the provinces and municipalities, which can often delay the start of work with tangles of red tape.

All work was to begin quickly to help rescue Canada's softening economy, providing "timely economic stimulus by creating jobs across Canada in the construction, engineering and manufacturing sectors as well as generating significant economic spinoff activity," say budget documents released four months ago Wednesday.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's economic blueprint emphasized that "measures to support the economy must begin within the next 120 days to be most effective."

But a sample of 12 of these federal projects across the country suggests little work is actually underway, even as several weeks' of good weather heralds the start of the construction season.