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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Chris Wagner: The role of Eden Radioisotopes in the future of nuclear medicine
Chris Wagner has more than 40 years of experience in nuclear medicine, beginning as a clinical practitioner before moving into leadership roles at companies like Mallinckrodt (now Curium) and Nordion. His knowledge of both the clinical and the manufacturing sides of nuclear medicine laid the groundwork for helping to found Eden Radioisotopes, a start-up venture that intends to make diagnostic and therapeutic raw material medical isotopes like molybdenum-99 and lutetium-177.
Alberto Talamo, Waclaw Gudowski
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 2 | June 2006 | Pages 172-183
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2603
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the future development of nuclear energy, the graphite-moderated helium-cooled reactors may play an important role because of their valuable technical advantages: passive safety, low cost, flexibility in the choice of fuel, high conversion energy efficiency, high burnup, more resistant fuel cladding, and low power density. General Atomics possesses a long experience with this type of reactor, and it has recently developed the gas turbine-modular helium reactor (GT-MHR), a design where the nuclear power plant is structured into four reactor modules of 600 MW(thermal). Amid its benefits, the GT-MHR offers a rather large flexibility in the choice of fuel type; Th, U, and Pu may be used in the manufacture of fuel with some degrees of freedom. As a consequence, the fuel management may be designed for different objectives aside from energy production, e.g., the reduction of actinide waste production through a fuel based on thorium. In our previous studies we analyzed the behavior of the GT-MHR with a plutonium fuel based on light water reactor (LWR) waste; in the present study we focused on the incineration of military Pu. This choice of fuel requires a detailed numerical modeling of the reactor since a high value of keff at the beginning of the reactor operation requires the modeling both of control rods and of burnable poison; by contrast, when the GT-MHR is fueled with LWR waste, at the equilibrium of the fuel composition, the reactivity swing is small.