Lucas Heights Reactor Shutdown Highlights Need for US Nuclear Corp. Technology
DENVER, CO / ACCESSWIRE / July 16, 2018 / On June 22nd a mechanical failure at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney, Australia shined a light on the tenuous supply chain of medical radioisotopes worldwide. These isotopes are key tools in both diagnosis and treatment for a wide range of medical conditions. The mechanical error at the Sydney plant sent hospitals throughout Australia and Southeast Asia scrambling to cover more than 10,000 doses a day, or about 8% of the worldwide demand.
US Nuclear Corporation (OTC PINK: UCLE) and MIFTEC industries, with their Z-pinch fusion technique have a revolutionary new solution addressing the global shortage and problematic supply chain of these essential medical isotopes.
The Current Problem
Currently, there are 11 reactors around the world making radioactive medical isotopes, including the Lucas Heights facility. None are in the United States, nor has any molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) been produced in the United States since 1988. These facilities irradiate cold war-era uranium-235 to create the molybdenum-99 (Mo-99). Molybdenum then decays to the short-lived Technetium-99m (tc-99m) and other isotopes, which are used to spotlight a wide variety of medical issues.
A reasonable question would be to ask why aren’t there any reactors in the United States capable of doing this? The answer is that every single nuclear reactor in the United States is designed for electrical power generation, instead of for research and the production of research isotopes.
Technetium-99m is the most commonly used medical isotope, with over 30 million medical diagnostic procedures annually. Yet, it is also one of the shortest lived, with a half-life of only 6 hours. So how is the spent uranium with a half-life of 703.8 million years made into medical isotopes? The answer is both shocking in it’s global needs, and scary in it’s potential for misuse.
The process, amazingly enough involves secretly shipping spent uranium rods from nuclear reactors in the United States to nuclear reactors in Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Czech Republic, and South Africa. Once there, private companies then rent irradiation time at the reactors, sending the resulting mix of isotopes back to processing plants such as France’s La Hague, where the nuclear medicine doses are prepared. In the final step of the process the doses are then sent on a commercial flight back to the United States for use in hospitals.
If that sounds like a convoluted process, that’s because it is. One of the main advantages of using Mo-99 and tc-99m is that they expose patients to relatively small doses of radiation during treatment, the trade-off however is that these isotopes have short half lives and even the smallest disruption along the supply chain can render them useless before they ever get to the patient.
Estimates vary on just what percentage of medical isotopes end up getting thrown out due to no longer being effective, but many doctors report having to dispose of expensive samples for reasons as simple as patients missing an appointment. The current shortfall of these isotopes is estimated at $7 billion globally.
The Solution
Production facilities using existing methods cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build, and up to a decade of construction time to complete making the barrier to entry extremely high. Further aggravating the problem, all of the reactor sites (except OPAL in Australia) are over 40 years old and are increasingly unreliable as they approach the end of their operational life. Lucas Heights being the perfect example.
Clearly a new method of production is needed. Enter US Nuclear Corporation.
US Nuclear Corp. aims to revolutionize the way that medical isotopes are made. Through their recent partnership with MIFTEC, whose parent company is MIFTI Nuclear Fusion, they have shown that their Z-pinch nuclear fusion technique can be used to produce medical isotopes in situ at hospitals and medical facilities around the world as opposed to the current method of producing them in distant reactors. The design is extremely small compared to other methods, and uses heavy seawater as a fuel supply. According to the most recent US Nuclear press release ”With rapid production at 50% of the current cost, many more patients will have the opportunity to receive these critical diagnostic scans and treatment, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of additional lives.”
Robert Goldstein, CEO of US Nuclear Corp, commented in the same press release, ”Radioisotope sales were $9.6 billion in 2016 and projected to reach $17 billion by 2021, but with MIFTEC’s excellent efficiency and affordability, and US Nuclear’s manufacturing capability, we believe the world market will multiply.”
Conclusion
While this may seem an ambitious issue to tackle, US Nuclear Corporation, with a new technology that can supply isotopes both cheaper and faster than existing facilities, is well positioned to become a major supplier in the projected $17 billion market. With over 70 years experience providing tritium monitors for the US government, along with a wide variety of other products that resulted in over $1m in sales in Q1, Robert Goldstein and crew appear set to move the company solidly forward in the near term.
The recent failure of the Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney serves as a strong reminder of the troubled state of the global supply chain of crucial medical radioisotopes. Widespread adoption of the US Nuclear Corporation and MIFTEC Z-Pinch technology could mitigate the industry’s issues and end the US reliance on aging foreign facilities.
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