Cyclotrons make commercial quantities of technetium

From Physics World: Cyclotrons make commercial quantities of technetium
Scientists in Canada are the first to make commercial quantities of the medical isotope technetium-99m using medical cyclotrons. The material is currently made in just a few ageing nuclear reactors worldwide, and recent reactor shutdowns have highlighted the current risk to the global supply of this important isotope.

Technetium-99m is useful for medical imaging because it emits only gamma rays and can be incorporated into a number of different molecules that target different types of tissue in the body. Today it is made in nuclear reactors by creating a radioactive isotope of molybdenum that then decays to technetium-99m.

The entire supply of the isotope for North America is made at the 60-year-old NRU reactor in Canada, which has experienced two extended, unscheduled shutdowns in the past decade.

As a result, the Canadian government challenged the nation's scientists to develop a new method of making the isotope that would use the medical cyclotron accelerators found in many major hospitals. These cyclotrons are already used to make other isotopes, but making technetium-99m in commercial quantities using accelerators has evaded physicists since it was first proposed more than 40 years ago.

Right on target
Now, a team including Paul Schaffer, head of the Nuclear Medicine Division at the TRIUMF accelerator lab in Vancouver, has cracked the problem after two years of hard work. The main challenge was designing a target of molybdenum-100 that produces significant amounts of technetium-99m when irradiated with protons from a cyclotron. Efficiency is important because molybdenum-100 is extremely expensive. They also had to come up with a way of extracting the isotope in a rapid way – it has a half-life of about 6 h – and is in a chemical form that can be used in medical applications. Also, because of the high cost of the target, it must be recyclable.

"We took the principles of physics, chemistry and engineering that people have known for years, and used them to write a recipe for upgrading a cyclotron so it could be used to make technetium-99m," explains Shaffer.

The team has shown that the method can be used on two different commercial medical cyclotrons in Canada – which means that it is compatible with many cyclotrons worldwide. The next step for the team is to gain regulatory approval for the cyclotron-made isotope to be used in medical procedures. This should take less than two years, according to the scientists.

Cyclotron-based production is also compatible with how many medical physicists see as the future of medical isotopes. It is expected that technetium-99m procedures will be replaced by positron-emission tomography, which also uses isotopes made in cyclotrons.

Medical isotopes possible without a nuclear reactor

From the Star: Medical isotopes possible without a nuclear reactor
VANCOUVER—Canadian scientists say they have developed a technique to produce medical isotopes in hospitals and clinics without the need for a nuclear reactor.

The announcement, on the final day of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Vancouver, could signal the end to a crisis that has shaken up the medical community, politicians in Ottawa, and patients throughout Canada.

Two ageing nuclear reactors produce about 75 per cent of the global supply of medical isotopes. One of them, the reactor in Chalk River, Ont., about 180 kilometres north of Ottawa, produces 40 per cent of the supply of the raw materials needed to produce the isotopes.

But the era of dependency on nuclear reactors in the production of isotopes is over, said Tom Ruth, senior scientist at TRIUMF, the national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics based in Vancouver.

“It’s clearly a financial issue with the government as they don’t want to invest more money into the existing reactor (at Chalk River),” he said Monday.

By upgrading equipment already stored in a dozen hospital basements across Canada, the scientists say they can manufacture the isotopes with out the nuclear component.

The reactor previously produced about half the North American supply of molybdenum-99, which decays into the technetium-99m isotope used in the majority of nuclear medicine procedures like diagnostic imaging and cancer treatments.

Chalk River produced the molybdenum-99 and shipped it to two processing centres in the United States, which then shipped the finished isotopes back to Canada.

But the Chalk River reactor faces full shutdown in 2016, and the U.S. has also told Canada it will decrease or stop exporting the highly-enriched uranium by 2019.

The process of developing the medical isotopes through a particle accelerator known as a cyclotron has been done for four decades but not on a commercial scale.

Adjustments made to the cyclotron now enables scientists to write a recipe to produce the finished isotopes which will make it no longer necessary to ship the raw materials to the U.S.

“We have now successfully performed this process at the commercial scale,” said Paul Schaffer, head of nuclear medicine at TRIUMF.

“We’ve delivered a proof of concept.”

There are 18 cyclotrons in Canada in 12 facilities — six in Vancouver and two each in Hamilton, Toronto and Montreal. Over the next few years, another seven new cyclotrons are planned to come online throughout the country.

Schaffer said there are still regulatory hurdles that must be met through Health Canada. Several industrial partners and regional health authorities across the country are now starting to talk about how to fund and implement the commercial production of medical isotopes.

B.C. Cancer Agency researcher François Bernard said it was previously thought that it would be too costly to produce the isotopes outside of a nuclear reactor but the new process has challenged that notion.

“We will be able to produce Canada’s needs,” he said.

“It’s essentially a win-win scenario for health care, because you end up removing your dependence on a single source of technetium-99m, but you also make other isotopes more widely available.”

Using only one cyclotron, the new method could produce a fresh supply for a large metropolitan area every day, Bernard said.

“For the price of one nuclear reactor, you can buy hundreds of cyclotrons, and by buying cyclotrons, not only do you make technetium available but you also make the other isotopes for PET imaging.”

Charles Edward Pietri, 1930-2012

From the Chicago Tribune: Charles Edward Pietri, 1930-2012 Charles Edward Pietri, a longtime member of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management, helped set policy for national research and development laboratories across the country and is credited with contributing to the safe and effective control of nuclear materials.

"He was a strong supporter of nuclear energy, while at the same time a staunch advocate of the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons," said his wife, Bettina.

Mr. Pietri, 81, a retired chemist with the U.S. Department of Energy's New Brunswick Laboratory on the site of the Argonne National Laboratory, died of acute leukemia Friday, Feb. 10, in his Western Springs home.

The Deerfield-based institute, founded in 1958, is an international organization that promotes safety in the handling of nuclear material and the practice of nuclear materials management through publications, presentations and meetings among professionals and technical workers in the field.

For more than two decades, until his health forced him to step down, Mr. Pietri coordinated annual meetings of the group in cities throughout the U.S., events that were open to its thousand-plus membership and featured hundreds of presentations and workshops.

"What was special about Charlie is that he did what he did so seamlessly, year after year, with humility, a smile and an incredible sense of humor that just drew people to him," said Scott Vance, the president of the institute. "He was at the center of all of our gatherings."

Born in New York in 1930, Mr. Pietri graduated from The Bronx High School of Science and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from New York University. He went on to work for a few years as a chemist for DuPont Co. in Wilmington, Del., prior to becoming a research chemist at the New Brunswick Laboratory, which was then in New Jersey.

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Pietri moved to the Chicago area after the lab relocated to Argonne. He worked as a science administrator, senior scientist, and assistant director for operations. He retired in the late 1990s, but continued for several years as a consultant at the lab, as well as with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"Charlie was an early mentor to me," said Colleen Gradle, a longtime scientist at the lab. "He was one of those people with a sort of sparkle in his eyes, a constant curiosity about the world around him."

Mr. Pietri in 1996 was named a fellow at the institute, its highest level of membership.

He was the author of numerous articles, patents and publications, and was a member of professional organizations including the American Chemical Society, American Nuclear Society, American Institute of Chemists and the Health Physics Society.

Mr. Pietri is also survived by two sons, Randolph and Richard; a daughter, Dianna Francis; two stepdaughters, Ginger Seery and Sarah Maxwell; a stepson, Andrew Smith; and eight grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, March 3, at Hallowell & James Funeral Home, 1025 W. 55th St., Countryside.

Is low-energy nuclear reaction new physics or an old scam?

Creamer Media Science News: Is low-energy nuclear reaction new physics or an old scam? Faced with the converging crises of fossil fuel depletion and climate change, humanity is in desperate need of an abundant, cheap and clean source of energy.

For decades, fusion has been the holy grail of nuclear energy researchers. ‘Hot’ fusion – the process that creates energy in the sun and hydrogen bombs – involves the fusing of hydrogen or deuterium atoms into helium. After decades of research, scientists have yet to crack the problem of managing the extreme temperatures involved. ‘Cold fusion’, which, in theory, would create useable energy at room temperatures, has for a long time been a similarly elusive dream.

In 1989, two scientists at the University of Utah, Pons and Fleischmann, claimed to have demonstrated a cold fusion reaction that produced excess energy, that is, more energy than would be yielded by a normal chemical reaction.

However, other researchers had great difficulty in replicating the Pons-Fleischmann experiments, and the whole notion of cold fusion became discredited as ‘junk science’.

Nonetheless, some scientists scattered around the globe have continued this line of research and, in the past few years, there has been a renewed explosion of interest in the subject.

The term ‘cold fusion’ has fallen out of favour, to be replaced by the more accurate label of low-energy nuclear reactions, or LENRs.

Scientists working in several labo- ratories have claimed to have produced excess heat energy when mixing hydrogen gas with nickel or palladium under certain conditions. Remarkably, the reactions produce no greenhouse gases or radioactive waste.

Last year, an Italian engineer and entrepreneur named Andrea Rossi catapulted himself to fame – or possibly infamy – by claiming to have invented a device – called the energy catalyser, or E-Cat – that produces commercially viable quantities of LENR energy using a special catalyst.

In October, Rossi performed a demonstration of a 1 MW E-Cat to a handful of scientists and a potential buyer at the University of Bologna. Subsequently, Rossi said he sold his device to an unnamed American buyer, which some people have speculated could be a branch of the US Department of Defense.

With Swedish company Hydro Fusion acting as the agent, the website ECAT.com is advertising 1 MW units for sale at $1.5-million each – a 25% price cut after two months, resulting from a “close and successful colla- boration with the first (still undisclosed) customer” and “new favourable and scalable production processes”. That price would equate to about R47-billion for capacity equal to the Medupi power station, which has a price tag of upwards of R120-billion. The fuel and maintenance costs are said to be a negligible $1/MWh each, while the estimated life span of a device is 30 years. ECAT.com claims that 10 kWh household units will be available for purchase by next year.

Rossi’s claims triggered a storm of debate, with many critics saying it was a scam, as his device defied the known laws of physics. Rossi has yet to allow independent scientific validation of his device, arguing that he wants to secure a patent first.

In recent months various competitors have emerged with similar assertions.

Greek company Defkalion Green Technologies issued a press release in November stating that it will begin selling an LENR device dubbed Hyperion this year. Another statement, released on January 23, invited inde- pendent third parties to test the reactors.

In mid-January, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) released a short video in which a Dr Joseph Zawodny says that the LENR process “has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy cleanly, without ionising radiation, without producing nasty waste”. He says this heat could be used on a household scale for space and water heating and converted into electricity generation, on an industrial scale for power generation and, ultimately, for transportation.

On his blog, Zawodny subsequently stated: “When considered in aggregate, I believe excess power has been demonstrated. I did not say, reliable, useful, commercially viable, or controllable.” Nevertheless, he says the video was released as part of a patent application filed by Nasa for an LENR device.

Most recently, several blogs are reporting that scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology held a short course on cold fusion in the last week of January, where a successful LENR demonstration was apparently conducted.

If commercial energy from LENR proves to be viable and cheap, it could completely revolutionise the world’s energy systems, rendering fossil fuels and conventional nuclear fission reactors obsolete and making fresh- water through desalination affordable. But a widespread transition to LENR energy would likely take a decade or two.

It is still too early to tell whether commercial LENR is imminent or will turn out to be a red herring. But this story is definitely one to watch.

High-schoolers can study nuclear physics at Michigan State University

From Gifted Atlanta: High-schoolers can study nuclear physics at Michigan State University
How often do teen-agers get the chance to study nuclear physics at the site of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory?

More often than you might think. Every summer, high-school kids spend a week learning nuclear science in the Physics of Atomic Nuclei program at Michigan State University.

The PAN Program introduces students to concepts in astrophysics, cosmology and nuclear science and allows participants to conduct their own nuclear physics experiments.

To participate, kids must have completed one year of high-school. Applications are due April 30, and the selection process is competitive. The good news: For those accepted, the residential program is free, other than transportation to and from the campus.

The PAN Program offers a separate, week-long program for high-school science teachers, so consider passing this information along to an outstanding teacher — most likely a physics or chemistry teacher — at your child’s school.

At DOE, Body Blows to Fusion, Nuclear Physics, and Particle Physics

From Science Insider: At DOE, Body Blows to Fusion, Nuclear Physics, and Particle Physics
Overall, the budget numbers for the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, the single largest funder of physical sciences research in the United States, look reasonably good. The office would see its budget climb by 2.4% to $4.992 billion. Three of the office's six major research programs, however, are slated for potentially devastating cuts. While programs with connections to clean energy technologies come out ahead, the fusion energy science, nuclear physics, and high-energy physics programs suffer.

President Barack Obama has made clean-energy research a priority, and officials at the Office of Science had designated research on advanced materials for energy, advanced biolfuels, and high-performance scientific computing as critical areas. Those priorities show through in the budget request released today. The office's single largest program, basic energy sciences, which funds research into condensed matter physics, chemistry, and materials, would see its budget climb 6.6% from its current level to $1.80 billion. Similarly, the biological and environmental research program, which houses DOE's biofuels research, would get a bump of 2.5% to $625 million. And the office's program in advanced scientific computing research would get a 3.3% increase to $456 million. DOE's Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which aims to quickly develop the most-promising energy related basic technologies, would see its budget rise from $275 million to $350 million.

On the flip side, the Office of Science's three other programs suffer cuts that, although seemingly small, could have severe consequences.

In the single most dramatic shift, DOE would pay for an increased contribution to the ITER international fusion project by diverting funds from its domestic fusion programs, including shuttering a fusion experiment known as the Alcator C-Mod at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Overall, the fusion energy sciences budget falls by 0.8% to $398 million, but increases the U.S. contribution to ITER to $150 million, up from $105 million this year. That shift forced officials to throw some things overboard, including MIT's $18 million budget for C-Mod. That machine is a donut-shaped device known as a tokamak that uses magnetic fields to trap an ionized gas or plasma and hold it at very high temperature and pressure. C-Mod is one of three tokamaks in the United States and a cousin of the gigantic $23 billion ITER that researchers are planning to build in Cadarache, France.

"I'm dismayed, but not surprised," says Raymond Fonck, a fusion physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. C-Mod had not yet been mined out scientifically, Fonck says, but there were arguments for keeping up the United States' two other tokamaks—at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey and General Atomics in San Diego, California. Fusion physicists have long worried that the U.S. contributions to ITER would starve the domestic fusion program, and that appears to be happening. In the new budget, fusion research would receive 45% of the money, ITER would receive 45% of the money, and operations of the U.S. facilities would receive just 10% of the resources, a far cry from the roughly 50% considered optimal. "To have a 10% operating budget is kind of insane," Fonck says. "I understand where it's coming from, but we're already under utilizing our facilities."

DOE's nuclear physics program would see its budget fall 3.6% to $527 million. But even the $20 million cut would have big consequences. For example, the budget would provide enough money to run an atom smasher known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, for roughly 10 weeks—half of the time it will run this year. However, RHIC is already running at 2/3 capacity, and if such foreshortened runs continue, it could be the beginning of a "death spiral," says Steven Vigdor, associate director for nuclear and particle physics at Brookhaven. RHIC recreates a soup of fundamental particles called a quark-gluon plasma that filled the universe a microsecond after the big bang. Similarly, the budget provides $22 million for development of a new accelerator known as the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University in East Lansing, instead of the $55 million university officials were expecting. FRIB would generate exotic nuclei for a wide variety of experiments.

Researchers say that with flat budgets expected for years to come, officials in the nuclear physics program may soon have to sacrifice one of three major projects. In addition to supporting RHIC and FRIB, the nuclear physics program also supports the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. CEBAF studies the structure of individual protons and neutrons and of nuclei. "Looking at the numbers, it seems to me that what the nuclear physics officials are trying to do is keep everybody alive, but just barely, this year with an eye to making a decision in 2014," Vigdor says.

The news for high-energy physicists may be even worse. The budget for such research, which explores fundamental particles and forces primarily through particle collisions, would fall 1.8% to $777 million. That sounds like a mere haircut, but the effect at the United States' last dedicated particle physics laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, could be momentous. "At first blush, it looks like a fairly disastrous budget," says Fermilab Director Pier Oddone.

That's because the budget cuts research and development for what would be Fermilab's flagship project in the next decade. Researchers hope to build a gigantic underground particle detector called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment in the abandoned Homestake mine near Lead, South Dakota, to snare particles called neutrinos fired 1300 kilometers through Earth from Fermilab. But plans to develop the mine have stalled and the budget cuts spending on LBNE from $21 million this year to $10 million. That cut threatens the entire project, Oddone says. "It seems that we'll have to ramp down spending by more than a factor of two," he says, "which won't leave enough to keep it alive." Overall, cuts in the high-energy physics budget would see Fermilab's budget fall by 5.1% to $366 million. And if plans for Fermilab's future founder, larger cuts could follow in years to come.

In almost any budget, there are winners and losers. But in the Office of Science budget for 2013, the losers take a real drubbing. It remains to be seen whether Congress will agree with the Administration's priorities.

Southern’s `Monumental Accomplishment’ Tempered by Fukushima

From Bloomberg.com: Southern’s `Monumental Accomplishment’ Tempered by Fukushima The chief regulator’s dissent in a vote that approved the first U.S. permit in 34 years to build a nuclear reactor is fueling a debate over safety as the first anniversary of Japan’s nuclear disaster nears.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted 4-1 yesterday to award Southern Co. (SO) of Atlanta a license to build two reactors at its Vogtle plant near Augusta, Georgia. The agency should have required the company to implement lessons from Japan’s nuclear crisis last year, said Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who opposed the license.

“Right now we know there are things that need to be fixed, things that need to be changed, or at least things that need to be analyzed,” Jaczko said yesterday in an interview at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. “For us to issue this license, and say ‘we’ll deal with them later,’ to me is kind of putting the cart before the horse.”

It has been less than a year after an earthquake and tsunami on March 11 caused meltdowns and radiation leaks at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501)’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant. The industry has faced concerns about nuclear safety at least since a partial meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant in 1979, and the NRC’s authorization of Southern’s reactor may face a challenge in federal court from environmental groups.

“The chairman’s vote reflects the post-Fukushima reality that U.S. reactors are not designed to deal with a meltdown” and will need years’ worth of work “to make them less dangerous,” Jim Riccio, a nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace USA, an anti-nuclear group, said in an e-mail.

Standardized Design
Southern will build the first U.S. reactors to use a standardized design, which it says will speed construction and reduce risks.

The agency’s vote is a “monumental accomplishment,” Thomas Fanning, Southern’s chairman and chief executive officer, said yesterday in a statement.

“Anything that we learn from Fukushima, I assure you we will bring to bear,” Fanning told reporters on a conference call yesterday. The NRC’s review of the planned reactors “has been thorough, it has been thoughtful and it is complete,” he said in an interview yesterday.

The NRC is weighing rules to improve safety at existing plants, and by March 9 it may direct owners to take steps to be better prepared for power failures.

Improving Safety
An agency task force in July recommended that the commission implement rules to improve safety at the 104 U.S. operating reactors, including reviews of seismic and flooding risks. An industry plan to place emergency pumps and generators at plants may speed the agency’s review of the proposed safety enhancements, Martin Virgilio, the NRC’s deputy executive director for reactor and preparedness programs, said at an NRC staff meeting with industry officials Jan. 13.

The agency should have required the Vogtle plant to adhere to all post-Fukushima regulations, such as a potential requirement to ensure that spent-fuel cooling pools have better monitoring equipment, Jaczko said. “I’m concerned that we will have challenges getting all of the Fukushima changes made” at the Vogtle plant, he said.

The NRC chairman said he will work to make sure the NRC’s Fukushima-related regulations are applied to Southern’s plant as the agency considers the rules, which he wants implemented by 2016.

Several environmental and consumer organizations said this week that they may file a lawsuit in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia challenging the NRC award of Southern’s reactor license.

Environmental Impact
They will ask the court to direct the NRC to complete another environmental impact statement to take into consideration lessons learned after Fukushima, said Stephen A. Smith, executive director of one of the groups, the Knoxville, Tennessee-based Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

“The only way the nuclear power is ever going to be successful is if you assure accidents like Fukushima don’t happen,” Smith said in a phone interview. “Cheerleading and the rush to move forward has overtaken safety,” he said.

The U.S. nuclear industry established its own safety- monitoring organization, the Atlanta-based Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, after a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island. Reactor owners have made technology upgrades at power plants, and plant owners spent more than $2 billion to bolster security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based industry group.

Commercial Facilities
“Probably the most robust commercial facilities on the planet are nuclear power plants,” Tony Pietrangelo, senior vice president and chief nuclear officer for the NEI, said in a Jan. 11 interview.

Nuclear accidents at U.S. plants would release less radiation than previously thought and would cause almost no immediate deaths, an NRC analysis issued on Feb. 1 determined.

Reactor designers are now implementing more “passive” engineering, which relies more on the laws of physics to improve safety, Eric Loewen, chief consulting engineer for GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy in Wilmington, North Carolina, said in a phone interview.

“Usually the laws of physics are a little bit more reliable than making sure that somebody left a valve open or making sure that some automated system works,” he said.