Will a Shortage of Nuclear Isotopes Mean Less Effective Medical Tests?
The Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario doesn’t sell a watt of electricity. Never has. But when it sprang a leak and shut down this spring, it threw a multibillion-dollar industry into crisis. Before it broke, the reactor produced nearly two thirds of the U.S. supply of molybdenum-99, or Mo-99, the isotope behind 16 million critical diagnostic medical tests each year. In July, things got worse: The Dutch reactor that supplied the remaining third shut down for a month of repair work. Nuclear imaging is used on tens of thousands of patients every day to take pictures of their hearts, lungs, kidneys, bones, brains and other organs. Doctors inject isotopes into a patient and use a radiation-sensitive camera to locate blood clots and tumors or to diagnose seizures, among other things. Mo-99 is critical for about 80 percent of all nuclear-medicine tests because as it decays, it releases a daughter...
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