Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
12/19/2014
Eleven countries, including the United States and Canada, joined this week a Joint Declaration on the Security of Supply of Medical Radioisotopes to ensure the security and reliability of molybdenum-99. With Canada set to stop government spending in 2016 on the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor, one of the world’s largest suppliers of moly-99 and technetium-99m, the medical isotope industry is expecting a shortage in the market in the coming years. This agreement, coordinated through the Nuclear Energy Agency’s Council of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, establishes a commitment from those countries to avoid the shortage of the medical isotope used in millions of procedures annually. “The Joint Declaration provides a coordinated political commitment by countries involved in the production and use of medical radioisotopes to help bring about the necessary changes across the supply chain,” a release from the NEA said. “It sends a clear signal to the actors in the medical radioisotope supply chain that the governments have the resolute intention to take coordinated action to ensure the long-term security of supply of this important medical radioisotope.”
As part of the effort, the nations also pledged to seek methods of production that use low-enriched uranium (LEU) rather than highly-enriched uranium (HEU) due to nonproliferation concerns. The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration has spearheaded effort to help countries make the switch, and the nations in this agreement committed to the change. “We recognize, on the other part, that an unsustainable economic structure is threatening the reliability of the 99Mo/99mTc supply chain, and that global action to move to full-cost recovery is necessary to ensure economic sustainability and long-term secure supply of medical isotopes,” the Joint Declarations said. “We affirm that any action to ensure the reliability of supply of 99Mo/99mTc must be consistent with the political commitments to non-proliferation and nuclear security.” In addition to the U.S. and Canada, the declaration was signed by Australia, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Poland, the Russian Federation, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
In the United States, the NNSA has supported companies looking to produce a steady supply of the isotope. The isotope has typically been produced outside the U.S. by government-subsidized efforts utilizing proliferation-sensitive HEU. But the NNSA has instituted a cost-sharing agreement with four companies in its efforts to jump start a domestic supply. Two of the companies involved in the NNSA’s cost-sharing agreement, GE Hitachi and B&W, have halted its development due to market viability concerns. However, the remaining two companies, SHINE and NorthStar, expect to begin production sometime near the end of 2016 or early 2017.
