South Africa provides new, safer source of key medical isotope Free

NPR: A company in South Africa has developed the ability to manufacture molybdenum-99 from low-enriched uranium. The innovation is important for two reasons. First, ⁹⁹Mo decays into another isotope, technetium-99m, which emits 140-keV gamma rays with a half-life of 6 hours. Those two properties make ^99mTc a useful medical tracer. Before the South African source came online, the US supply of ⁹⁹Mo came from just two sources, in Canada and the Netherlands. The Canadian and Dutch sources make ⁹⁹Mo from highly enriched uranium, which accounts for the second reason for the new, South African source's importance: decreased risk that terrorists could get their hands on the raw material for making a nuclear weapon.