Experts talk on developing the isotope supply chain

The big picture: Paul Dickman, president of the World Council on Isotopes and chair of the ANS External Affairs Committee, moderated the event. After introducing the speakers, he kicked off the discussion by taking a broad look at why isotopes matter and why their supply chain is imperiled.

“Every modern society depends on isotopes, often without really realizing it. [Isotopes] sterilize 40 percent of all single-use medical devices, power diagnostic imaging, initiate nuclear reactor startups, and ensure the integrity of aircraft and turbine components. Yet this critical global system is fragile and growingly dependent on foreign sources,” he said.

In many cases, single facilities, or single nations, represent the majority of global production—leaving the world exposed to cascading shortages. The list of isotopes with vulnerable supply chains includes but is not limited to molybdenum-99, lutetium-177, actinium-225, iodine-131, iridium-192, and yttrium-90.

While each vulnerable isotope presents a unique set of challenges, much of the webinar focused on the supply chains of cobalt-60 and californium-252 as two contrasting case studies shedding light on the industry’s broader issues.

Cobalt-60: Co-60 is used for cancer therapy and sterilizing medical equipment. It is primarily produced in Canada, Russia, and China, with India and Argentina also producing part of the total global supply. Among those five countries, 20 reactors are producing Co-60—all but one of which are power reactors. So, there exists both “a diversity of supply and a highly reliable network in terms of uptime” which puts the Co-60 supply chain in a relatively healthy place, according to Richard Weins, director of business development and strategic supply at Nordion, a major radioisotope supply company.

Weins added that the positive change for Co-60 in the past two years contrasts a five-year period of relative difficulty. According to him, a reduction in Russian supply combined with an unexpected increase in demand led to increasing supply chain fragility.

These rapid changes, to Weins, reflect one of the key issues in bolstering supply chains: predictability. Development becomes more difficult to justify when investors don’t know if demand will grow by 1 percent or 10 percent in the near future—especially considering the long lead time and capital intensity that development projects require.

Californium-252: Ca-252 is a neutron emitter vital for reactor startups, neutron radiography, and oil exploration. In sharp contrast to Co-60, Ca-252 is produced in only two reactors in the world, both of which are research reactors. According to Samantha Schrell, a program manager at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, those reactors are the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at ORNL and Russia’s SM-3.

That small number of facilities is only one of many challenges that the Ca-252 supply chain faces. Schrell explained that Ca-252 needs a heavy feedstock, such as curium, which is itself a precious radioisotope with a limited supply. Demand is also increasing, thanks in part to the proliferation of new reactor startups, programs, and projects.

Schrell added that the already precarious supply chain for Ca-252 was put under further stress by the Russia-Ukraine war, an event that has introduced issues to the supply chains of many radioisotopes.

Go deeper: To learn more about the current state of the isotope supply chain and the path forward, watch the full webinar, which features further commentary from Steven Biegalski of Georgia Tech and Anikitos Garofalakis of OECD Nuclear Energy Agency.