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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.
Abdurrahman Ozturk, Jonathon Gardner (Univ of South Carolina), Kyle Brinkman, Lindsay Shuller-Nickles (Clemson Univ), Travis W. Knight (Univ of South Carolina)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 628-634
A MOOSE (Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment) based application, TREX, has been developed for modeling and simulation of advanced ceramic waste forms at multiple length scales. A method was developed for incorporating microstructural details at the mesoscale and computing effective material properties that can then be applied at the engineering scale capable of modeling the entire waste form. The work described includes the creation of Kernel, Material, and Postprocessor objects necessary to model the advanced ceramic waste form. Using these developed tools, the diffusion of cesium was modeled in a hollandite waste form. Experimental data and first principle calculations taken from the literature were used to inform models of the hollandite material properties.