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Accelerator Manufactured Medical Isotopes

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Accelerator Manufactured Medical Isotopes

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 11 May 2019, 08:08:13

Because of the twisted fear and illogical stance of the anti-fission wing of American politics a new medical isotope manufacturing facility has broken ground in Wisconsin. The new corporation is using the much less efficient accelerator driven method of manufacturing in an attempt to quell the protests that arise every time a new 'reactor' is licensed, even one strictly used for medical isotope manufacturing and research rather than power production.

Shine breaks ground for US medical isotope facility

10 May 2019

Shine Medical Isotopes yesterday broke ground on its first medical isotope production facility in Janesville, Wisconsin. Commercial production of isotopes, including molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), is scheduled to begin in 2021.


The groundbreaking ceremony was attended by federal, state, and local officials, including US Department of Energy (DOE) Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Lisa Gordon-Hagerty; Lantheus Medical Imaging President and CEO Mary Heino; and Janesville City Manager Mark Freitag.

"Construction of the Janesville production facility is a critical step toward establishing a reliable global supply of life-saving diagnostic and therapeutic isotopes for patients around the world," said Shine founder and CEO Greg Piefer.

Once complete, the 43,000-square-foot (4000-square-metre) facility will house eight of Shine's accelerator-based medical isotope production systems, capable of producing over one-third of global demand for Mo-99.

Ground was broken for Building One at the Janesville site in August 2017. Shine announced in February 2018 that it had completed construction and taken occupancy of that building, which will initially be used to house the first fully-integrated, full-size Shine production system. During construction of Shine's main production facility, Building One will be used to train employees and develop operating experience with equipment.

Shine submitted its construction licence application to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 2013. In October 2015, following an independent review of Shine's preliminary safety analysis report, the NRC's advisory committee on reactor safeguards recommended that a construction permit should be issued. In February 2016, the NRC issued a construction permit for the facility, the first it had issued for a non-power utilisation or production facility since 1985.

The groundbreaking follows the transfer by the city of Janesville in early April of a 91-acre plot of land on the south side of Janesville to Shine. The transfer was part of a tax increment financing deal between the company and the city. The land transfer came after Shine met several conditions set by the City, including approval of the necessary construction permits from the city, state, and the NRC, as well a financial audit providing proof of financial viability through construction of the facility.

Mo-99 is used in hospitals to produce the technetium-99m employed in around 80% of nuclear imaging procedures. Produced in research reactors, Mo-99 has a half-life of only 66 hours and cannot be stockpiled, and security of supply is a key concern. Most of the world's supply currently comes from just four reactors in Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia and South Africa, and recent years have illustrated how unexpected shutdowns at any of those reactors can quickly lead to shortages. Furthermore, most Mo-99 is currently produced from highly-enriched uranium (HEU) targets, which are seen as a potential nuclear proliferation risk.

Technetium-99m is used in over 40,000 procedures in the USA per day. However, there has been no commercial production of the isotope in the USA since 1989. Since 2009 the NNSA has been working in partnership with US commercial entities to accelerate the development of technologies to produce the radioisotope domestically, without the HEU, which are themselves seen as a potential nuclear proliferation risk.

Shine's system uses low-energy, accelerator-based neutron source to fission a low-enriched uranium target dissolved in an aqueous solution.

NNSA has supported Shine with a USD25 million cooperative agreement. Industry partners must match any funding amount. Shine was also recently selected with three other US companies to begin negotiations for another award of up to USD15 million to continue efforts to accelerate the establishment of a domestic supply of Mo-99.

"Today's groundbreaking is a win-win for our national security and the healthcare industry," said Gordon-Hagerty. "Domestic production of 'Moly-99' without HEU reduces global proliferation threats and ensures a reliable supply to healthcare providers who need it every single day for diagnostic medical procedures."

Researched and written by World Nuclear News


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Re: Accelerator Manufactured Medical Isotopes

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sat 11 May 2019, 09:13:44

I am glad to hear about this facility. Janesville is about 35 miles from my new home, and the area has been depressed since the GM assembly plant closed in 2008.
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Re: Accelerator Manufactured Medical Isotopes

Unread postby Subjectivist » Fri 22 Nov 2019, 08:43:32

Most medical isotopes are useful for one of two reasons. Either your body ignores them so they spread easily for tracking flow patterns, or they substitute for a similar isotope to concentrate radiation at a target. The later is exemplified by radioactive iodine which concentrates in the thyroid delivering a dose directly to those glands.

I always thought that Technetium was only a tracer isotope doing the flow pattern to look for restricted blood vessels and things like that. However I recently heard that by chemically binding it to glucose it can be used to target cancer cells directly as they use far more glucose than healthy cells use. What chemical does Technetium react like in the human body? If they plan on using it like the rumor says then it will be present frequently enough to act as an analog substitute the same way Strontium substitutes for Calcium, but for some other mineral.
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Re: Accelerator Manufactured Medical Isotopes

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 22 Nov 2019, 16:49:15

Subjectivist wrote:Most medical isotopes are useful for one of two reasons. Either your body ignores them so they spread easily for tracking flow patterns, or they substitute for a similar isotope to concentrate radiation at a target. The later is exemplified by radioactive iodine which concentrates in the thyroid delivering a dose directly to those glands.

I always thought that Technetium was only a tracer isotope doing the flow pattern to look for restricted blood vessels and things like that. However I recently heard that by chemically binding it to glucose it can be used to target cancer cells directly as they use far more glucose than healthy cells use. What chemical does Technetium react like in the human body? If they plan on using it like the rumor says then it will be present frequently enough to act as an analog substitute the same way Strontium substitutes for Calcium, but for some other mineral.


Chemically Technetium is a chemical analog of Manganese which is a crucial trace element in many enzymes used by the human body. It is so common in food however that a Manganese deficiency is very rare so the odds of you absorbing a detectable quantity of Technetium is very small.

All Uranium-235 fission reactions have about a 6% chance of forming Technetium as one of the product fragments. All Technetium isotopes are radioactive, it has no stable isotopes whatsoever. As a result of this the amount you find in nature is only in Uranium rich minerals and it makes up a tiny trace formed by the 6% reaction in cases of spontaneous fission of U-235 in the mineral ires where it is trapped.

In health terms Tc-99 with a half life of 211,000 years, Tc-98 with a half life of 4,200,000 years Tc-97 with a half life of 4,210,000 years are so long lived that they are no a radiation threat by any reasonable standard. Manganese steel alloy is corrosion resistant but Technetium steel is extremely corrosion resistant, to the point that it has been proposed as ideal for use in nuclear power stations. Other uses for Technetium steel have not progressed because of the completely unscientific fear the average consumer has of anything classified as radioactive.

This fear completely ignores realities like the fact that Potassium is a key material in your biology and all potassium includes the radioactive isotope K-40. Also your body contains a easily measurable quantity of radioactive Carbon C-14. As far as that goes even the Manganese that the Technetium may on rare occasions substitute for has a naturally occurring trace quantity of Mn-53 in it.
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Re: Accelerator Manufactured Medical Isotopes

Unread postby EnergyUnlimited » Fri 22 Nov 2019, 17:35:34

@Tanada,
One way or another Tc-98 is still 1000 times more radioactive than U-238.
Of course it is beta emitter etc of different radiation profile but still.
Saying that I would prefer to work with Tc-98 assuming it is free of other niceties than for example in beryllium processing plant regardless of the latter not being radioactive.

Btw, Tc very much like Mn or Re will to a degree chemically resemble Iodine.
Hence we have HMnO4, HTcO4, comparable to periodates etc.
Of course HTcO4 is a weaker oxidant than HIO4/H5IO6 but still.
Tc-99m is for this reason used in thyroid diagnostic.
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Re: Accelerator Manufactured Medical Isotopes

Unread postby sparky » Fri 22 Nov 2019, 22:24:55

.
any "nukullar" technology report has the power to strike fear into the population ,
this has been fostered intensively by the green movement , no matter the need or the irrationality
any sincere environment activist honestly weighing the pro and con of the technology is ostracized immediately
no politician want to touch the issue with a barge-pole
anti-nuclear attitude is an ingrained dogma
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Re: Accelerator Manufactured Medical Isotopes

Unread postby Subjectivist » Fri 10 Jul 2020, 15:56:24

SHINE moving ahead with medical isotope plans in Janesville

As SHINE Medical Technologies’ medical radioisotope plant rises from the ground and crews burrow nuclear accelerator bunkers underground, the high-tech company continues to move quietly toward “the day.”

That will be sometime in 2022, when SHINE’s long-awaited molybdenum-99 facility on the city’s south side goes live.

The SHINE campus being built on former city-owned land has been a decade in the works. But over the last six months, two T-shaped cranes—a rare sight in a city of 65,000 people—offer evidence that nuclear medicine will be part of Janesville’s future.

The startup company inked a multimillion-dollar tax incentive agreement with the city in 2012, a landmark deal in the years coming out of the Great Recession. In the past year, the company has emerged from a long-running private financing bid and a successful quest to land millions in federal funding for domestic production of moly-99, an agent used to illuminate bone and body tissue in thousands of medical tests a day.

Today, SHINE’s downtown offices occupy enough of the six-floor Prospect 101 building that phone calls to its corporate headquarters are routed to multiple floors.

Only time, a heavily regulated construction process and final approval of a federal operating license remain as hurdles for the company, which was founded in Monona.

CEO Greg Piefer is fond of explaining that the company intends to make life-saving medicine from uranium materials that were used to make nuclear bombs that governments designed to kill people.

It’s a catchy way of distilling a nuclear production concept that is far above the heads of most laypeople. But it’s true, and as SHINE continues toward its go-live day in 2022, the company has moved a long way toward actually making good on a promise to produce a major share of the world’s supply of moly-99.

More recently, SHINE officials have begun talking about plans to break ground on a European plant, which would help the company effectively produce and ship a nuclear compound that begins to decay just hours after it’s produced.

Officials also have talked of plans to produce not just moly-99, but also an array of cancer treatment isotopes.

SHINE and research partners in Prague, Czech Republic, have produced doses of the cancer drug lutetium-177 that have met independent industry purity tests, the company announced in a recent news release.

Lutetium-177 is a radioactive isotope used to treat stomach and lung cancers. It would be another proprietary process in the hyper-competitive field of nuclear medicine, and one that SHINE has said would give it a more diverse platform.

Up to now, the company has been abstract about whether it intends to launch cancer medicine production in tandem with the full commercialization of its Janesville facility in 2022.

SHINE officials could not be reached for this story. However, in his most recent interview with The Gazette, a SHINE spokesman said the cancer drug plans are on a separate track from local moly-99 production.

Last fall, SHINE began what likely will be a months-long federal review process of its application for a nuclear operating license.

Meanwhile, the moly-99 production plant continues to make quiet progress on the south side.


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