OTTAWA - The National Research Council says it's working with private partners to perfect a method of making medical isotopes without a nuclear reactor.
The agency says the new method of producing isotopes for medical imaging and diagnostic procedures is safe, clean, inexpensive and reliable.
The National Research Universal reactor at Chalk River, Ont., produced almost half the world's supply of medical isotopes before an extended maintenance shutdown in May 2009.
It resumed operations in August but it's scheduled to close by 2016 -- time, the NRC says, to come up with more secure and sustainable alternatives.
Dr. Carl Ross, who leads a team from the NRC Institute for National Measurement Standards, says the new method requires no weapons-grade uranium and generates virtually no radioactive waste.
Ross says the so-called linear accelerator method is "virtually guaranteed" to replace the production of medical isotopes by nuclear reactor.
"The physics is well-established," he said in a statement. "The chemistry of separation is well-known. So I don't really see any impediment to it being successful."
In the new method, a high-energy linear accelerator bombards coin-sized discs of the stable isotope molybdenum-100 with X-rays, to produce radioactive molybdenum-99.
Molybdenum-99, with a half-life of 66 hours, soon decays into technetium-99m, which is used in some 5,500 diagnostic procedures in Canada every day. Tc-99m can then be separated from Mo-99 using technology developed by U.S.-based NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes.
The National Research Council plans to work with its private partners over the next two years to develop a manufacturing process.
A demonstration facility will be constructed at the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon to prove that a high-power electron accelerator can produce a significant fraction of the medical isotopes required by nuclear pharmacies across the country.
