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Reimagining nuclear materials for the future of medicine
Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.
V. Romanello et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 262-267
Fusion-Fission Hybrids and Transmutation | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13430
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The performances of three different types of innovative transmutation systems have been investigated in order to assess in a comparative way their potential to manage nuclear waste arising in a geographical region, where different countries have different policies with respect to nuclear energy development, but share the objective of a common optimized waste management strategy in order to minimize the waste masses sent to a geological repository. The three systems are 1) a critical low conversion ratio fast reactor (LCFR); 2) an accelerator driven system (ADS) and 3) a hybrid fission-fusion system (FFH). In order to simplify the comparison, the three systems have been loaded with comparable fuels, in particular with the same Pu to Minor Actinides (MA) ratio. A waste management scenario study has been performed: the results show that, apart from the technological readiness of each single option, the performances, in terms e.g. of time needed to eliminate specific spent fuel inventories or in terms of reduction of decay heat and radiotoxicity in a deep geological repository, are rather comparable.