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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Nano to begin drilling next week in Illinois
It’s been a good month for Nano Nuclear in the state of Illinois. On October 7, the Office of Governor J.B. Pritzker announced that the company would be awarded $6.8 million from the Reimagining Energy and Vehicles in Illinois Act to help fund the development of its new regional research and development facility in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook.
Jisue Moon, Kristian Myhre, Hunter Andrews, Joanna McFarlane
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 787-808
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2158666
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Technitium-99m (99mTc), a widely used radioisotope, is used in tens of millions of medical diagnostic procedures annually. However, it is hard to store and must be immediately used upon production due to its short half-life (i.e., 6 h); thus, it is currently produced from 99Mo, which itself is a result of 235U fission. The majority of 99Mo supplies to U.S. patients are currently provided by foreign producers and produced using highly enriched uranium (HEU). In order to minimize the proliferation risks of HEU-based medical isotope production, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has funded a program to accelerate the development of technologies to produce 99Mo without the use of HEU.
Today, the global supply of 99Mo depends on a limited number of nuclear reactors, and production has been interrupted unexpectedly since 2009 due to the fleet’s advanced age. Alternative options for 99Mo production are discussed in this paper, and one potential option is to obtain 99mTc from molten salt reactors (MSRs). A MSR is a nuclear fission reactor that can operate at or close to atmospheric pressure with liquid fuel, which allows for producing isotopes in a timely manner. In this paper, the past and current production of 99Mo via nuclear reactors is described, and the future of 99Mo production by MSRs is discussed. The behavior and chemical properties of molybdenum in fluoride salts in MSRs and the possible extraction methods are also examined in addition to the limitation of current studies.