An agreement by the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to fund $2.3 million in development work at NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes could lead to creation of a domestic supply for molybdenum-99, the most widely used medical radioisotope. The cost-shared cooperative agreement will help the Madison, Wisconsin, company with development of its accelerator-based process for manufacturing the isotope by bombarding targets of the naturally occurring isotope 100Mo with gamma rays.
During an April 2010 summit in Washington, DC, President Obama and 47 other heads of state pledged to secure all the world’s highly enriched uranium (HEU) by 2014 to eliminate the proliferation threat that the material poses (see PHYSICS TODAY,July 2010, page 24). But the US is without a domestic source of 99Mo, an isotope with a 66-hour half-life whose decay product, metastable technetium-99 (99mTc), is used in 8 out of 10...
