Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
11/14/2014
The National Nuclear Security Administration will add an additional $8 million to its cost-sharing agreement with two companies trying to establish a domestic supply of the medical isotope molybdenum-99, the agency announced late this week. The NNSA entered into a cost-sharing agreement with the two companies, NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes and SHINE Medical Technologies, in 2010. In this round of awards, NNSA gave an additional $5.2 million to NorthStar to further develop its technology to produce Mo-99 via neutron capture, bringing the total NNSA support to $16.1 million; and it gave SHINE $3.2 million to further develop its accelerator-based technology to produce Mo-99 via fission of low-enriched uranium (LEU), bringing the total NNSA support to $13.9 million. “This additional cost-shared support from NNSA to its cooperative agreement partners is especially vital as the world’s largest producer is expected to cease Mo-99 production in 2016, and highlights our continued commitment to ensure that reliable supplies of this important medical isotope are available to meet patient needs in a way that is consistent with our nuclear nonproliferation objectives,” Anne Harrington, NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, said in a release.
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 shortage had led to a slew of startups –eight-to-nine companies have already sent the NRC letters of intent to submit construction authorization licenses for a potential Moly-99 production facility—looking to fill the lucrative void. Most, if not all, of these companies have a timeline for the end of 2016/beginning of 2017 for reaching production capabilities, but regulatory hurdles lie ahead.
The NNSA 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, although both SHINE and NorthStar expect to begin production sometime near the end of 2016/early 2017.
