Lack of imaging isotopes may be hazardous to patients

[Kevin Palmer]

Caution — Lack of Imaging Isotopes May Be Hazardous to Patients
By Beth W. Orenstein
Radiology Today
Vol. 10 No. 14 P. 14

It was somewhat ironic that this year’s SNM annual meeting was held in Toronto because Canada is home to one of five aging reactors worldwide that supply molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), the material needed to produce the technetium-99m (Tc-99m) generators used in 80% of all nuclear medicine studies. The Chalk River reactor in eastern Ontario supplies about 30% of the world market.

As the SNM meeting was under way, its members knew that Chalk River had been offline since May to repair a water leak. People were talking about how the 52-year-old reactor was likely to be down for quite a while. “No one was dissuading us from that notion,” says Robert Atcher, PhD, MBA, of the University of New Mexico/Los Alamos National Laboratory, chair of SNM’s isotope (Mo-99) task force, and the society’s immediate past president. “No one was saying it would be fixed faster than a few months.” Some were speculating it may not be fixed at all, which would affect 50% of the U.S. market.

The timing of the Chalk River shutdown couldn’t have been worse. The world’s other major Mo-99 supplier, the Petten reactor in the Netherlands, was scheduled to be down for several weeks starting this month. “That means their capability to make up for part of the outage in Canada was going to be offline as well,” Atcher says. Like Chalk River Laboratories, Petten also supplies about 30% of the world market, including the other 50% of the U.S. market. Continue Reading...