Reduce, reuse and recycle: a green solution to Canada's medical isotope shortage

Applied Radiation and Isotopes : Including Data, Instrumentation and Methods for Use in Agriculture, Industry and Medicine
R GaleaR G Wells

Abstract

Due to the unforeseen maintenance issues at the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor at Chalk River and coincidental shutdowns of other international reactors, a global shortage of medical isotopes (in particular technetium-99m, Tc-99m) occurred in 2009. The operation of these research reactors is expensive, their age creates concerns about their continued maintenance and the process results in a large amount of long-lived nuclear waste, whose storage cost has been subsidized by governments. While the NRU has since revived its operations, it is scheduled to cease isotope production in 2016. The Canadian government created the Non-reactor based medical Isotope Supply Program (NISP) to promote research into alternative methods for producing medical isotopes. The NRC was a member of a collaboration looking into the use of electron linear accelerators (LINAC) to produce molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), the parent isotope of Tc-99m. This paper outlines NRC's involvement in every step of this process, from the production, chemical processing, recycling and preliminary animal studies to demonstrate the equivalence of LINAC Tc-99m with the existing supply. This process stems from reusing an old idea, reduces the nuclear waste to virtually z...Continue Reading

References

Aug 18, 2009·Applied Radiation and Isotopes : Including Data, Instrumentation and Methods for Use in Agriculture, Industry and Medicine·Daniel R McAlister, E Philip Horwitz

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Citations

Aug 23, 2019·Journal of Nanobiotechnology·Oleksii O PeltekAlexander S Timin

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