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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.
Praneel P. Gulabrao, Kevin T. Clarno
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 161-172
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1794455
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Photon buildup is a function of energy, medium, and geometry and therefore must be specifically calculated for the case of interest. The Martian atmosphere, mostly comprising carbon dioxide, is becoming more relevant to radiation researchers and therefore warrants the study of this gas mixture’s buildup properties for ionizing photon flux resulting from the secondary effects of galactic cosmic rays and solar flares. Specifically, this work uses the MCNP6 code to develop energy absorption buildup factors in finite slab models for energies ranging from 40 keV to 15 MeV with Martian regolith as the backscattering medium. The Martian carbon dioxide cycle is accounted for by determining maximum and minimum mean densities as a function of orbital position. An isotropic point source model for the atmosphere is also developed using the geometric progression fitting function. Buildup is bounded to a factor of approximately 23 at 100 keV for normally incident photons at the top of the atmosphere. For conservatism, the design problem neglects coherent scattering but assumes bremsstrahlung effects and uses Klein-Nishina free-electron cross sections for Compton scattering.