Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff recommended the agency authorize construction of a medical isotope production facility in Missouri following completion of an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the project.
That leaves completion of the safety review for the plant and the NRC’s ruling on the permit application.
“After weighing the environmental, economic, technical, and other benefits against environmental and other costs, and considering reasonable alternatives, the NRC staff’s recommendation, unless safety issues mandate otherwise, is to issue a construction permit to” Northwest Medical Isotopes, according to the final EIS, which was posted Monday on the agency’s documents website.
Northwest plans to build a $70 million, privately funded facility at the Discovery Ridge research park at the University of Missouri Research Reactor in Columbia. The program would produce low-enriched uranium (LEU) targets, which would be irradiated at partnering research reactors and then returned to the Northwest facility for dissolution and recovery of molybdenum-99, the EIS says. The isotope decays into technetium-99m, which is used in millions of medical imaging procedures globally each year.
“We will have approval this year and we expect to start construction in the fourth quarter,” Northwest Chief Operating Officer Carolyn Haass said in a telephone interview.
NRC staff determined the facility would have small impacts in nearly all environmental areas studied, including air quality and noise, water resources, waste management, and environmental justice. That means the environmental impacts cannot be detected or are so small “they would neither destabilize nor noticeably alter any important attribute of the resource,” the report says.
The only exception to this was the finding that the cumulative impact on air quality and noise would be small to moderate, while the effect on ecological resources would be moderate — defined as impacts that would “alter noticeably, but not to destabilize, important attributes of the resource.”
The NRC is scheduled in September to complete its safety evaluation review for the Northwest Medical Isotopes plant. There is no official schedule yet for publication of the report and for a commission ruling on the construction permit application.
Haass said the company plans in the third quarter of the year to start work on administrative buildings and other support structures that do not require the federal approval. Assuming it begins building the production plant toward the end of this year, construction would wrap up in mid-2019; that would be followed by several months of commissioning and hot startup for the facility.
The NRC will also have to approve a separate operations permit for the plant. “We don’t expect to receive that application before we issue the construction permit,” commission spokeswoman Maureen Conley said by email Wednesday.
Once operational, the site is expected to produce 3,000 to 3,500 six-day curies of molybdenum-99 per week, Haass said.
Northwest is one of several companies aiming to re-establish U.S. commercial production of mo-99 after more than a quarter-century. The sole supplier in the Western Hemisphere, the National Research Universal reactor in Canada, stopped production last fall.
The NRC in February 2016 issued a construction permit for SHINE Medical Technologies’ $100 million radioisotope manufacturing plant in Janesville, Wis.
