SHINE Technologies, Janesville, Wis., signed contracts with the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management to support the company’s initiative to domestically manufacture a medical isotope without highly enriched uranium, according to a DOE press release.
In an email this week, a spokesperson for SHINE said the grant the company got from the agency is worth up to $35 million and enables the company “to be reimbursed for expenses incurred to bring our new manufacturing operations online.” The plant eventually could produce up to 20 million doses of medical isotopes annually, the spokesperson said.
SHINE is one of four recipients of NNSA grants, mandated by Congress last decade, to spur a domestic Molybdenum-99 industry. Mo-99 decays into Technetium-99, an isotope widely used to create images of the human body for medical diagnoses.
In December, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm effectively ended imports of Mo-99 from foreign manufacturers who produced the isotope from U.S. highly enriched uranium. NNSA estimates the fledgling U.S. Mo-99 industry will produce commercial quantities of the isotope in 2023 or so.
While NNSA will provide the low enriched uranium to produce Mo-99, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management will help SHINE deal with any waste byproducts that cannot be disposed of commercially, NNSA wrote in its press release. These will include a “small volume of residual, low-enriched uranium,” the SHINE spokesperson said.