Nuclear medicine coverage for countries determined to acquire nuclear weapons? For years, this issue has clouded efforts to increase the production of medical radioisotopes, many of which are made in nuclear reactors that run on highly enriched uranium (HEU) -the fissile material in a bomb or use HEU as targets to generate radioisotopes. A report released today by AAAS, the publisher of Science Insider, highlights a growing range of alternative methods of producing radioisotopes that would make it harder for future proliferators to get hold of fissile materials.
The safer methods could help defuse tensions with neighboring nations nuclear ambitions, analysts say. Iran, for example, has been engaged in a decadelong standoff with the United States and its allies over its nuclear program and cited the need to produce medical isotopes and power as key justifications for his efforts. A measure of confidence building might be for Iran to explore the production of medical isotopes which avoids the use or production of fissile material. In this regard, if the negotiators of the United States Department of State "can sell the idea of Iran participating in advanced nuclear technologies [that steer clear of fissile material] something then maybe you have," said Mark Jansson, Director of special projects at the Federation of American scientists in Washington, DC by establishing alternative, the authors of the report, he said, "did a fantastic job."
radioisotopes are widely used in medical imaging and to irradiate certain types of tumors. They have long been considered a dividend of nuclear technology and have been an important reason that the nuclear powers of the world in the 1950s and 1960s have promoted the construction of research reactors worldwide. Medical isotopes can also be produced in cyclotrons or spallation neutron sources, for example, but specialized facilities were prohibitive until the great embrace a technology called positron emission (PE) scanning in the 1980 strong demand for medical isotopes used in acute PE tomography scanning has lowered the cost of ion accelerators in hospital. Consequently, "the technology of the accelerator is much less expensive and more capable than before," says the report, written by Derek and Seth A. Updegraff Hoedl the AAAS Center for Science, Technology and Policy . security
Their report focuses on the most widely used medical isotopes in the world: technetium-99m (Tc-99m), which is used in about 80% of all nuclear medicine procedures: 30 million procedures per year. 99m Tc in nuclear medicine is popular as it is easily incorporated into a variety of chemicals that can concentrate the radioisotope in various types of tissue for imaging. the hospitals using Tc-99m buy radioisotope its parent, the molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), which is a decay product of uranium-235. the main way as Mo-99 is now produced is to irradiate uranium targets in a reactor . this research does not have to be this way: the AAAS report notes that 99 MB can be created by a reaction on photonuclear MB-100 or Mo-99 can be totally ignored by the production of Tc-99m directly bombarding Mo-100 with protons. The latter approach is currently being tested by a cyclotron manufacturer in Canada, the report notes. "The risk of proliferation with accelerators is considerably weaker," said Updegraff.
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