What Did You Do with the Technetium-99m I Gave You Yesterday?

[beamjockey]

An alternate title might be

Inject All You Want. We'll Make More!

Roger Z brought in a clipping about account of a technetium-99m shortage.

My first thought on skimming this was "There's always a technetium-99m shortage. There's always going to be a technetium-99m shortage."

Technetium-99m has a six-hour half-life.

Alas, the news proves to be non-trivial. Hospitals obtain fresh technetium-99m from a supply of molybdenum-99, which has a 66-hour half-life, with ^99mTc as a decay product. Make the molybdenum isotope in a reactor, transport it to hospitals, then "milk" fresh technetium from a solution containing ⁹⁹Mo. This works for many days, then eventually fresh ⁹⁹Mo is needed.

If the Chalk River reactor is down for a few days, no problem. If it's down for several weeks, trouble.

Comments

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Yes, I heard about this shortage on the news yesterday, which mentioned that three other smaller nuclear installations making this stuff were or would also shut down for maintainance at roughly the same time, leaving the only installation still able to generate this a Dutch reactor in Petten. Which was news to me, but apparantly in normal times it supplies roughly 30 percent of world demand, with the Chalk River reactor supplying about the same amount. So you only got half a dozen manufacturers for these essential products.