Though half of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s corporate partners have stalled or dropped out of an effort to jump-start the domestic U.S. supply of a key medical isotope, a Department of Energy Inspector General report released yesterday reported that progress is being made and agency officials believe the program’s objectives can still be met. Four companies signed cooperative agreements with NNSA’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative in 2009 and 2010 to begin supplying 100 percent of the U.S. demand for Molybdenum-99 using low-enriched uranium instead of highly-enriched uranium by the end of 2014. The IG reported that $6.7 million has been reimbursed to the corporate partners thus far, and as of January all four of those companies—GE Hitachi, Babcock and Wilcox, NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes, LLC, and a team from the University of Wisconsin’s Morgridge Institute for Research—had met milestones for licensing, design and fabrication. However, the IG noted that GE Hitachi suspended its program in February “after determining that its process was not financially competitive,” and an unnamed company will meet its production capacity goals three years late, in 2018. The NNSA did not identify the company in response to questions from NW&M Monitor.
Despite those setbacks, the IG said the NNSA is still confident in the progress being made by the two remaining projects, which “are on track to meet the remaining milestones, including facility construction, equipment installation and full-scale production,” the IG wrote. And the IG found that funding for the program was being doled out appropriately, given the cooperative agreement’s restrictions. “Our tests did not reveal any material internal control weaknesses in selected areas of [cooperative agreement] administration,” the IG said. And, “while there are significant challenges to establishing a reliable domestic production capability for Mo-99,” such as achieving a full cost-recovery economic model and cooperation between government, industry and the medical community, “NNSA is aware of the challenges and is considering how best to address them.”
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