In a New Year’s boon for Belgium’s Institute for Radioelements, the U.S. Department of Energy has postponed by two years a ban on exporting U.S.-origin, weapon-usable uranium for the production of medical isotopes.
“[C]urrent global supplies of Mo-99 [Molybdenum 99] produced without the use of HEU [highly enriched uranium] are not sufficient to meet U.S. patient needs,” Energy Secretary Brouillette wrote in a Jan. 2 letter to Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Brouillette copied Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), the committee’s ranking member, on the note.
Mo-99, which can be produced from either highly enriched or low-enriched uranium, is the source for technetium-99m: a gamma-emitting isotope commonly used for medical diagnoses. While suppliers for decades have relied on highly enriched uranium to generate the targets for isotope production, they are increasingly transitioning to use of proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium or other means.
The Institute for Radioelements in Fleurus, Belgium, some 40 miles over the road from the capital city Brussels, is in the process of switching over Mo-99 production to low-enriched uranium from highly enriched uranium.
In the meantime, DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which controls the U.S. stockpile of highly enriched uranium, has applied for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to export nearly 5 kilograms of the material to the Belgian company for conversion into Mo-99.
As part of a nonproliferation effort aimed at reducing the spread of weapon-usable material abroad, the American Medical Isotopes Production Act of 2012 (AMIPA) set a January 2020 end date for export of highly enriched uranium for production of Mo-99. However, the law allowed DOE and the Department of Health and Human Services to delay the export ban by up to six years, to January 2026.
Brouillette, though, told the lawmakers that his delay on the export ban would last no more than two years.
With DOE’s finding that low-enriched uranium production of Mo-99 does not meet U.S. needs, one of the hurdles for granting the NNSA export license is now removed.
NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes, of Beloit, Wis., has supplied the medical isotope in the U.S. for just over a year. It objected to the NNSA export application, along with isotope producer Curium, the nongovernmental Nuclear Threat Initiative, and the head of the University of Texas’ Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project.
“By granting a blanket 2-year extension, DOE perversely incentivizes the Belgian company to delay conversion to LEU targets, thereby undercutting the other companies (many U.S.-based) that have complied with AMIPA by making substantial investments to convert to – or initiate with the help of DOE subsidies – production of medical isotopes without HEU,” Alan Kuperman, Proliferation Prevention Project founding coordinator, said by email.
