Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
6/20/2014
A New Mexico startup, Eden Radioisotopes LLC, which features former Sandia National Laboratory researchers, has emerged as the latest company attempting to build a facility dedicated to the production of molybdenum-99. With Canada set to stop government spending in 2016 on the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor in Canada, 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. Back in November, the company received a license to use the SNL reactor conceptual design, which many in the company had helped develop. “One of the pressing reasons for starting this company is the moly 99 shortages that are imminent in the next few years,” Eden’s Chief Operating Officer Chris Wagner said in a statement. “We really feel this is a critical time period to enter the market and supply replacement capacity for what is going offline.”
The Sandia conceptual design involves a smaller reactor that would only produce moly-99. According to Eden Chief Technology Officer Dick Coats, who developed the design in the 1990s, the reactor uses low-enriched uranium in its all-target core. “This reactor is very small, less than 2 megawatts in power, about a foot-and-a-half in diameter and about the same height, but very efficient,” Coats said. “The targets are irradiated and every one can be pulled out and processed for moly 99. The entire core is available for moly 99 production. Every fission that occurs produces moly. The reactor’s only purpose is medical isotope production. This is what is new and unique. Nobody thought about approaching it that way.”
Eden, which was established last year, is in the process of raising investment capital to meet initial costs through production, estimated to be about $75 million. The company hopes to establish a facility in Hobbes, N.M. in an effort to take advantage of the skilled workforce in the surrounding community. Eden hopes to be in production within four years, a timeframe that would cover the license process for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Food and Drug Administration.
The potential halt in Moly-99 production has raised concerns within the federal government. The National Nuclear Security Administration has been helping to jump start domestic production of medical isotopes through a cost-sharing cooperative agreement with four companies to develop technology to produce Moly-99, the medical isotope used in 16 million medical procedures annually in the United States. The isotope has typically been produced outside the U.S. by government-subsidized efforts utilizing proliferation-sensitive HEU. Two of the companies, GE Hitachi and B&W, involved in the NNSA’s cost-sharing agreement have halted its development due to concerns of market viability, though.
