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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.
Nicolas Leclaire, Isabelle Duhamel, François-Xavier Le Dauphin, Blair Briggs, Jérôme Piot, Malvina Rennesson, Arnaud Laville
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 4 | December 2014 | Pages 429-445
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-29
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The MIRTE (Materials in Interacting and Reflecting configurations, all Thicknesses) program was established to answer the needs of criticality safety practitioners in terms of experimental validation of structural materials and to possibly contribute to nuclear data improvement, which ultimately supports reactor safety analysis as well. MIRTE took the shape of a collaboration between the AREVA and ANDRA French industrialists and a noncommercial international funding partner such as the U.S. Department of Energy. The aim of this paper is to present the configurations of the MIRTE 1 and MIRTE 2 programs and to highlight the results of the titanium experiments recently published in the International Handbook of Evaluated Criticality Safety Benchmark Experiments.