Planethopia

The Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario doesn’t sell a watt of electricity. But when it sprang a leak and shut down
this spring, it threw a multibillion-dollar industry into crisis. Before it broke, the reactor produced nearly two thirds of the U.S. supply of molybdenum-99, or Mo-99, the isotope behind 16 million critical diagnostic medical tests each year.

Nuclear imaging is used on tens of thousands of patients every day to take picture of their hearts, lungs, kidneys, bones, brains and other organs. Doctors inject isotopes into a patient and use a radiation-sensitive camera to locate blood clots and tumors or to diagnose seizures, among other things. Mo-9 is critical for about 80 percent of all nuclear-medicine tests because as it decays, it release a daughter isotope called technetium-99m, which is energetic enough for the camera to see, but its short, six-hour half-life means it conveniently decays to practically nothing after 24 hours. Unfortunately, Mo-99 can’t be stockpiled for more than a few days.

Just five reactors supply 95 percent of the world’s Mo-99, and they’re all past their prime. A nuclear reactor’s average life span is 40 to 50 years. Chalk River is 52 years old. The Dutch reactor – which came back online in August – is 47. The other three, in France, South Africa and Belgium, are 42, 43 and 47, respectively. In 1996, Canada boldly tried to replace them all with its own two-reactor facility, called MAPLE, that would pump out enough Mo-99 to supply the whole world. Other reactor-builders, figuring they would be crushed by MAPLE’s massive output, stayed out of the isotope-making business. Since the MAPLE debacle, two long-term solutions have been put into motion.

The nuclear-power firm Babcock & Wilcox plans to build a facility to supply half the U.S. Mo-99 market. And this summer, Congressman Edward Markey of Massachusetts introduced a $163-million bill for domestic Mo-99 production, some of which could be used to retrofit a reactor at the University of Missouri that could fill the other half. But neither project are likely to be done before 2012.

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