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Latest News
Strontium: Supply-and-demand success for the DOE’s Isotope Program
The Department of Energy’s Isotope Program (DOE IP) announced last week that it would end its “active standby” capability for strontium-82 production about two decades after beginning production of the isotope for cardiac diagnostic imaging. The DOE IP is celebrating commercialization of the Sr-82 supply chain as “a success story for both industry and the DOE IP.” Now that the Sr-82 market is commercially viable, the DOE IP and its National Isotope Development Center can “reassign those dedicated radioisotope production capacities to other mission needs”—including Sr-89.
T. C. Luu, J. L. Friar, A. C. Hayes
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 152 | Number 1 | January 2006 | Pages 98-105
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2567
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In high neutron flux environments where isomers can be strongly populated by nucleonic reactions, isotope abundances from reaction network chains can be affected by the population of nuclear isomers. At high temperatures and densities, there is the additional possibility of populating these isomers electromagnetically. Here, we examine the rates for electromagnetic excitation of the isotopes of several isomers of interest both in astrophysics and applied physics (e.g., 235U, 193Ir, and 87,88Y). We consider six possible electromagnetic processes, namely, photoabsorption, inverse internal conversion, inelastic electron scattering, coulomb excitation, and (,') and (e,e') reactions. We find that for plasma temperatures kT ~ 1 to 10 keV, the electromagnetic reactions rates are negligible. Thus, we conclude that reaction network calculations do not need to include the possibility of electromagnetically exciting nuclear isomers. This is true in both stellar and terrestrial thermonuclear explosions, as well as in plasma conditions expected at the National Ignition Facility.