Josh said:

You know this may be an opportunity. With impending cancer medicine famine, it should be easier to whip up support for a bit of “fiscal stimulus” to build a new research reactor for medical applications. We need a better term for it though than “research reactor”. Something more cuddly sounding.

Well AECL did try with the MAPLE reactors, ‘maple’ sounds harmless enough.

Hopefully the problems at the NRU will help break the logjam over those two reactors at Chalk River. Mostly the issues there are regulatory – it isn’t that the reactors don’t work – they just don’t work exactly as stated in the initial licensing application. The HANARO reactor in Korea (which is a MAPLE) is already producing isotopes with a modified operating permit. From what I can gather the same thing could be done for the ones in Canada.

It looks to me like the government is going to have to deal with its regulator again, as they did two and a half years ago to get things moving.

Ain’t that the truth. The big issue is that isotope production reactors will always be seen as ‘dual-use’ and thus will always be high on the hit list when there is talk about proliferation. Both India and Pakistan used reactors initially tasked for industrial/medical isotope production to create plutonium for their respective weapons programs, so unfortunately this is real enough that it cannot be brushed off as a myth.

However we cannot throw out the baby with the bathwater, we have managed to live with nuclear weapons for a generation now, and I believe that it is time to accept that this demon is not going back into Pandora’s box, and there is no reason why we have to live without the benefits of radiation technology trying to do so.

Sadly, this fact escapes many anti-nuclear fanatics. Their response to an article like this is often something like “this technology is not needed for cancer and may be causing these cancers in the first place!” Or “we should be using natural methods to cure cancer, radiation treatment is a conspiracy”. Their ignorance knows no bounds.

The biggest issue you would face here has to do with a license for the reactor versus a license to produce any kind of isotope product. Producing isotopes is beyond the scope of a research reactor license and I do not believe there are even any private entities that have such a license except for extremely tiny quantities as tracers. Research reactors can be used in neutron activation research but producing quantities of isotope products is not permitted without a completely seperate approval process.

Right now, there is only one fully operational reactor in the US which produces significant quantities of synthetic radioisotopes. That is the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge. It can and does produce medical isotopes, but it is also the only domestic source of critical isotopes like Californium-252 and it is used primarily for producing industrial and research isotopes. The capability is stretched thin.

This was not always the case. At one time the US had the capacity to produce large quantities of radioisotopes on demand. Many of these capabilities were directly related to facilities initially used for weapons production. The Savannah River Site was built to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, but the reactors there that irradiated U-238 targets to produce plutonium could also irradiate other materials to produce large quantities of other materials. Savannah River also had the expertise and facilities to seperate and fabricate radioactive materials. Again, this was an offshoot of weapons activities.

The Idaho National Laboratory also had facilities for the production of specialty materials in quantity, including plutonium 238, californium 252 and other heavy elements. This was not directly weapons related, however. There were also some test reactors at the Hanford site that were capable of producing isotopes. The Fast Flux Test Reactor was supposed to be used in experiments to produce high quality isotopes efficiently using fast spectrum neutrons.

This is generally gone at this point. Savannah River had all their reactors shut down in the name of disarmament, even though they were being used for other things. Because the reactors -could- product weapons material, this was justification for their retirement. The Idaho national laboratory only has one reactor in operation and it is used primarily for materials testing. The Fast Flux facility is in mothballs and scheduled to be torn down.

To be blunt, this is politics. We do not have the capability anymore to produce some very important materials. They are generally being imported from Russia. This has become a major issue with Pu-238. We can’t make it anymore and so we might not be able to send any more probes into deep space.

Anyway, there are reactors that are not used for this but could be used for it. Wouldn’t it make sense to consider having some of them outfitted with the target assemblies to create medical isotopes so that they could be used for that in a contingency?

For that matter, why not just build a few more medical isotope reactors? I guess the MAPLE reactors were a big deal because they were designed to be large and high capacity, but a few smaller ones could also be useful in a pinch.

What about building some more TRIGA reactors? They’re supposed to be the cheapest reactors in the world and only cost a few million dollars plus the cost of the building for them. The General Atomics site on them says they can be configured for producing any reactor generated medical isotope and so they could install a few of these at universities or something, and they could be used for general training and research most of the time and medical isotopes on the side, as a minor thing, but if there were a supply problem then they would be able to start making more medical isotopes.

Worse, because radiopharmaceuticals represent a rather small market, they have always depended on government support, and production facilities are now very vulnerable in the current economic climate.