In the United States, 90% of all the medical isotopes are imported, and the remaining 10% are, for the most part, from companies producing a single isotope instead of a wide variety. That becomes a major problem when one considers the shortcomings and unreliability in the supply of medical isotopes. Most of the world's supply of Mo-99 comes from five aging nuclear reactors that are 43 to 52 years old. Moreover, two of them are due to shut down in a few short years -- the Osiris reactor in Saclay, France is due to shut down in 2015, and Canada's NRU reactor is scheduled to be shut down by 2016.
There are two main obstacles that will affect medical grade isotope production: the aging nuclear reactors that produce the isotopes and the U.S. government's stance on foreign producers utilizing HEU (highly enriched uranium) used to produce medical isotopes. Earlier this year, a coalition of U.S. public health, medical, and nuclear nonproliferation experts urged Congress to restrict the use of imported Russian medical isotopes produced with HEU, which is bomb-grade uranium, and to block them completely within about five years:
We write to urge you to amend S. 99, the American Medical Isotopes Production Act of 2011, which was passed by the U.S. Senate on 17 November 2011. The amendment is necessary to achieve the bill's two stated objectives: (1) minimizing global commerce in bomb-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU) to reduce risks of nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation; and (2) ensuring a reliable supply of medical radio-isotopes derived from molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) -- which account for 80 percent of our country's 20-million nuclear diagnostic procedures annually -- by fostering domestic production without HEU.
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