The U.S. imports all the molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) isotope that’s used to make the commonly used radiomarker technetium-99m. It’s widely used for cancer detection and in life science research, but producing it requires a nuclear power plant with an appropriate setup. That’s why there are less than a handful of places around the world that make it. Now a partnership between the Argonne National Laboratory and SHINE Medical Technologies has demonstrated a new process for producing, separating, and purifying molybdenum-99.
The method involves bombarding a low enriched uranium uranyl sulfate solution with fast neutrons (speed of 14,000 km/s or higher and having energies above 1 MeV), which gives off a variety of byproducts, including Mo-99. The team managed to separate out the Mo-99 from the hundreds of other fission byproducts to purity levels standard for medical applications, paving the way for the method to hopefully soon be implemented in a production facility.
Flashback: U of Wisconsin to Build Reactorless Mo-99 Medical Isotope Generation Facility…
Source: Argonne…