Safer source for medical isotopes hailed

The United States has received its first shipment of molybdenum-99 produced in this manner in South Africa, promising a more reliable supply while allaying fears of nuclear proliferation, a release by the National Nuclear Security Administration said Monday.

Molybdenum-99 is used to make the radioactive tracer technitium-99m, used in thousands of noninvasive diagnostic scans every day, the release said.

Until now, molybdenum-99 has been manufactured only from highly enriched uranium, which people worried could be stolen by terrorists from one of the foreign plants involved in the first stages of production.

"It's a sitting duck for al-Qaida because these facilities are not guarded like military facilities, but they have bomb-grade uranium," Alan Kuperman, an expert in nuclear proliferation at the University of Texas, says.

The highly enriched uranium used to make molybdenum-99 is a nuclear terrorist's dream, he says.

"I'm talking about the identical material that's used in the U.S. to make nuclear weapons," he says.

To further complicate matters, there's no molybdenum-99 made in the United States, which gets most of its supply from two aging reactors in Canada and the Netherlands.

When both were shut down for maintenance and safety issues last summer, doctors and patients were left in the lurch.

"The situation was very bad. Very bad," says Marcello Di Carli, chief of nuclear medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Federal officials say they hope supply issues and worries about nuclear proliferation will soon become a thing of the past, now that NTP Radioisotopes Ltd., in South Africa, in a joint effort with the U.S. government, has figured out how to mass-produce molybdenum-99 using low-enriched uranium.

"I would say by three to seven years, we should be extremely optimistic that international producers will get away from the use of highly enriched uranium for medical isotope production," Parrish Staples, with the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, says.

Copyright 2010 United Press International, Inc. (UPI).