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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.
Kenji Yokoyama, Makoto Ishikawa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 3 | November 2014 | Pages 350-362
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-11
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To provide a reactor physics benchmark for burnup reactivity coefficients, experimental data, showing the relationship between excess reactivity and accumulated thermal power acquired during the experimental fast reactor JOYO MK-I duty power operation in the late 1970s, have been evaluated and analyzed. To improve the prediction accuracy of nuclear characteristics through the use of integral experimental data, nominal values and uncertainties, including correlations of the experimental data, were evaluated. All possible uncertainty factors were evaluated and quantified by utilizing knowledge obtained after the MK-I duty power operation and calculation results based on the latest reactor physics analysis methods. Meanwhile, the present evaluated data have been reviewed and approved by the International Reactor Physics Experiment Evaluation Project, with the expectation that these data will be widely used. In the present paper, the evaluation of nominal values and uncertainties is described with a focus on the measurement technique uncertainty, which is a dominant uncertainty factor of the burnup reactivity coefficient. In addition, new analysis results of the benchmark problem are shown by the use of the latest Japanese evaluated nuclear data JENDL-4.0.