Speaker
Description
A large fraction of the radioisotopes used for diagnostics and therapy in healthcare are currently produced in research reactors build in the heydays of the development of nuclear power. These reactors will be decommissioned in the coming decade. For various reasons significantly less new reactors for research and isotope production are coming on-line. At the same time the use of radioisotopes in medicine is continuously growing. It is therefore important to investigate the possibilities of alternative, accelerator-based production routes for the isotopes currently used as well as for alternative isotopes that allow the same functionality to be realized. In addition new diagnostic and therapeutic radiolabelled compounds call for the development of production routes for new isotopes. To meet these objectives extensive R&D on high power accelerators and targetry as well as a significant experimental effort to collect the nuclear data required to assess the fundamental feasibility of proposed production routes are needed.
The challenges associated with these ambitions will be discussed using a few specific cases, among which the most used radioisotope 99Mo.
