NRC Approves Medical and Industrial Isotope Production At New Jersey Nuclear Power Plant.

[NNadir]

Almost all of the world's medical and industrial radioisotopes are produced in Canada and in the Netherlands in small reactors designed for producing them.

The Chalk River Reactor in Canada is 52 years old, and needed to be shut for refurbishing, and the Petten High Flux Reactor simultaneously needed some work on piping.

As a result a severe shortage of medical isotopes was obtained through out the western world, undoubtedly producing cheering form the nuclear ignorance crew, all of whom hate nuclear science on the grounds it is way over their tiny little heads, and they are therefore preternaturally unable to understand a single useful thing about the subject, and object to it on grounds of ignorance and superstition.

I am happy to say that the Hope Creek Nuclear Power Plant, not far from where I live, has now received a licence to make Cobalt-60, which is used in cancer treatment and as a gauge material in many industries.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved a licence amendment allowing a pilot program to produce cobalt-60 at the Hope Creek nuclear power plant in New Jersey.

The amendment permits operator PSEG Nuclear to generate and transfer Co-60, a radioisotope with a variety of medical and industrial uses including cancer therapy, under NRC regulations for 'by-product' material. PSEG will be allowed to insert up to 12 modified fuel assemblies containing rods filled with cobalt-59 in the reactor's core. During reactor operation, the Co-59 absorbs neutrons and becomes Co-60. The irradiated assemblies are removed from the reactor (in the case of a BWR, at the next refuelling outage) and processed to recover the isotope.

The pilot program will allow PSEG to gather data to verify the satisfactory performance of the modified fuel assemblies prior to entering full-scale production of Co-60. The company is planning to insert the modified assemblies into the 1209 MWe BWR during a planned refuelling outage this year.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Second_US_reactor_gets_isotope_go-ahead-1210107.html">Second US reactor gets isotope go-ahead

Interestingly, Co-60 can, in theory, be isolated from steel after very long irradiations, on the order of decades, in which Fe-60 is created. This relatively long lived isotope, which is created in very tiny amounts, reaches radioequilibrium with Co-60, although a very long period is required. In theory however, one can "milk" Co-60 from this source, although it is cheaper and easier to simply irradiate the single stable isotope of cobalt, Co-59, with neutrons to produce this isotope.