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Radium sources yield cancer-fighting Ac-225 in IAEA program
The International Atomic Energy Agency has reported that, to date, 14 countries have made 14 transfers of disused radium to be recycled for use in advanced cancer treatments under the agency’s Global Radium-226 Management Initiative. Through this initiative, which was launched in 2021, legacy radium-226 from decades-old medical and industrial sources is used to produce actinium-225 radiopharmaceuticals, which have shown effectiveness in the treatment of patients with breast and prostate cancer and certain other cancers.
M. M. R. Williams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 183 | Number 1 | May 2016 | Pages 116-125
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-62
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The experimental and theoretical results of Authier et al. on the fast burst reactor Caliban have been re-analysed using the Gamma probability distribution function (pdf). The Gamma pdf requires only the mean and variance of the accumulated counts to fully define it. Equations for the mean value and variance of the neutron, precursor and count rate distributions have been developed and solved via the forward form of the probability generating function. We have found excellent agreement, to within experimental error, with the experimental results for the wait time and its variance. In addition, the values of the cumulative pdf obtained via the Gamma pdf are in good agreement with those reported by Authier et al. who used more accurate methods.