Taking our nuclear medicine

By Gordon Prather

You probably know by now that the U.S. nuke infrastructure is broken
beyond repair. We couldn’t make a new nuke from scratch, today, even if
we wanted to. Of course, according to Clinton-Gore, we won’t need to
make any new nukes ever again. Even if the Chinese, Pakistanis and
Indians continue to turn out new nukes like little sausages.

Some of you may even think it’s a good thing that our nuke
infrastructure is broken. But the hundreds of thousands of Americans
who undergo the 13 million “nuclear medicine” procedures conducted each
year probably won’t agree with you.

Take the radioisotope Molybdenum-99, which is a daughter product of
the fission of Uranium-235, as an example. Moly-99 promptly decays to
another radioisotope, Technitium-99, which is used as a “tracer” in tens
of thousands of medical procedures every day in the United States. Now
that the U.S. nuke infrastructure is broken there is no longer a U.S.
source for Moly-99 — and hence, for Tc-99, the short-lived tracer.

Why does that matter? Moly-99 has a decay half-life of only 67
hours. If you make a batch of Moly-99, after 67 hours, half of it is
gone. And since the half-life of the daughter, Tc-99, is so much
shorter — only 6 hours — when half of your Moly-99 supply is gone, so,
essentially, is half of your Tc-99 tracer. That means that nuclear
medical men need a freshly brewed batch of Moly-99 ever week or so.

Now it is very desirable for a radioactive tracer to have a short
half-life. The Tc-99 is injected into the patient shortly before the
medical procedure begins and by the time the procedure is over half of
it has decayed away. In a few days time, the Tc-99 radioactivity
remaining in the patient is practically undetectable. Since it has such
a short half-life, it is necessary that Tc-99 be produced only shortly
before it is actually needed. Moly-99 continually produces Tc-99 by
beta-decay, which means that mother and daughter are different chemical
elements and can easily be separated chemically. The Moly-99 comes to
the nuclear medicine man plated onto a small metal cylinder. Just
before the scheduled medical procedure, the cylinder’s Moly-99 surface
is chemically wiped clean — or “milked” — of the Tc-99 that has been
produced there by Moly-99 decay during the past several hours. The
Moly-99 which has not yet decayed remains on the surface, producing more
Tc-99 during the next few hours to be milked for other nuclear medicine
procedures. But the amount of Tc-99 produced per second at the end of a
67-hour period is only half of what it was at the beginning.

Moly-99 is one of the most likely isotopes to be produced in
Uranium-235 fission. In the most economic production process, highly
enriched uranium (HEU) — 93.5 percent Uranium-235 — is plated on a
target and irradiated in a nuclear reactor. Upon removal, the Moly-99
is chemically separated from the other fission products on the HEU
target and then plated onto a small metal cylinder.

The time between when the HEU target is taken out of the reactor to
the time it arrives in the medical practitioner’s hands needs to be
minimized. So, it is not a good thing that Moly-99 is not being made
here in the U.S. and that all Moly-99 has to be imported. Fortunately,
at the moment, Moly-99 is still being produced in Canada, which is not
too far away in time. But, before long, it may be that the only place
we can get Moly-99 will be Russia.

Why only Russia? Because, in the name of nuclear disarmament, we
have not only allowed our nuke infrastructure to be broken beyond
repair, the Carter decision to forgo chemical reprocessing of spent
reactor fuel has had a devastating effect on our peaceful nuclear-energy
infrastructure as well. One of the casualties of the dismantlement of
the DOE nuclear and nuke infrastructure was the DOE production of
Moly-99. Furthermore, DOE bought the only remaining U.S. commercial
producer of Moly-99 and effectively shut it down. Why? Because it used
HEU for its targets and the U.S. wishes to completely eliminate the use
of HEU by the private sector.

Now, it certainly is imperative that we keep tens of kilogram amounts
of HEU from falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue states. It is
almost trivially simple to make an HEU bomb, so, in the current U.S.
nuke proliferation prevention climate, any commercial use of
weapons-useable HEU is a big no-no. We have hundreds of tons of HEU in
our stocks and the Clinton-Gore administration has committed us to
converting all that HEU to low-enriched uranium (LEU) — by diluting it
with ordinary Uranium metal — having already shut down permanently all
the U.S. plants that formerly made HEU. But here we are talking about
large amounts of HEU and very small amounts are used in making a HEU
target.

Nevertheless, the Clinton-Gore administration has been trying —
without much success — to get all producers using HEU targets to use
reactor-grade LEU instead. But U.S. firms are reluctant to try the
LEU-target approach. For one thing, if they use a LEU target instead of
a HEU target, then what they have when they take the LEU target out of
the reactor is essentially a very small “spent fuel” element. In order
to get the Moly-99 out of the spent fuel, they have to reprocess it.
And reprocessing spent fuel in the U.S. has been a big no-no since Jimmy
Carter forbade it more than 20 years ago.

But what about foreign producers of Moly-99? Surely Jimmy Carter
can’t scare them. And you’re right, he can’t and didn’t. So what’s to
prevent them from continuing to make Moly-99 from HEU?

Senator Chuck Schumer, that’s who.

Chuck Schumer? How did he get into this? Well, the Schumer
Amendment to the Energy Policy Act of 1992 resulted in — among other
things — restrictions on exports of U.S. HEU to Moly-99 producers. The
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is prohibited from issuing a license
for the export of HEU to Moly-99 producers unless, a) there are no LEU
targets available and the Moly-99 producer promises that whenever LEU
targets do become available that, b) he will switch to them.

The Schumer Amendment has put the squeeze on Canada’s Nordion and
Belgium’s Institut National des Radioelements and Mallinckrodt in
the Netherlands which got their HEU from the U.S. and, together,
currently produce almost all of the HEU targets for Molyl-99 production.
And since either all producers will have to switch at one time to LEU
targets — which make the Moly-99 produced much more expensive — or
none of them will, at the moment it looks like none of them will. That
is, we may be soon faced here in the U.S. with no supplier of Moly-99.

So guess what? The Russians — whose nuke infrastructure is alive
and kicking — have also got tons of HEU and no Chuck Schumer. The
Russians are gearing-up to fill the potential worldwide medical isotope
gap. There are also rumors that the Russians may be about to introduce
Concordski II — a new improved Russian supersonic transport plane.
Short-lived medically indispensable radioactive isotopes like Moly-99
could make a super high-value item of airfreight. Nuclear medicine
might even make the difference between Concordski II being a success or
failure.

Gordon Prather

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Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. He also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. Read more of Gordon Prather's articles here.