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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.
Makoto Oyaidzu, Masayuki Ohta, Kentaro Ochiai, Atsushi Kasugai
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 7 | October-November 2021 | Pages 842-847
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1962119
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the Advanced Fusion Neutron Source (A-FNS), an accelerator-driven fusion-relevant neutron source that is planned for development in Japan, a few grams (3.5 g at full power operation) of tritium will be generated every year, mainly in the lithium target system. Since the generated tritium would migrate out of the lithium target system, it is necessary to estimate the tritium migration into and out of the lithium target system for the design of detritiation systems for the A-FNS. Therefore, a preliminary estimation is performed in the present study. As a result, it is found that almost all of the generated tritium in the lithium target system would be trapped in the impurity removal system, while less than 0.5% would migrate out. It is also indicated that the amount of tritium that would migrate out of the lithium target system would be able to be processed with the existing techniques so far.