March 17, 2014

EXPERTS TAKE AIM AT Mo-99 PRODUCED BY RUSSIA

By ExchangeMonitor

A group of public health, medical, and nuclear non-proliferation experts sent a letter to U.S. lawmakers yesterday urging them to amend pending legislation to restrict the use of the medical isotope molybdenum-99 produced by Russia. In the Jan. 17 letter to Reps. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Ed Market (D-Mass.), the group of 15 experts said that S. 99, the American Medical Isotopes Production Act of 2011, which passed the U.S. Senate in November, must be amended to restrict the use of medical isotopes from Russia because the country is using highly-enriched uranium in the fabrication process, in direct contrast with the aims of the bill. “Russia’s subsidized, HEU-based production of medical isotopes would make it difficult for prospective U.S. producers to compete, and would also undermine responsible foreign producers who have complied with U.S. requests to invest in non-HEU-based production,” the experts wrote. They added that, “because Russia has its own supply of HEU, it would be unaffected by the bill’s HEU export restrictions.”

Outages at existing foreign reactors that produce the bulk of the world’s supply of Mo-99 created widespread shortages of the medical isotope over the last several years and highlighted the need to develop a domestic production capacity, while the proliferation risks involved in using HEU to produce the isotopes has spurred a move to use proliferation-resistant LEU for isotope production. Mo-99, and its decay product, technetium-99m, is used in approximately 16 million procedures annually in the United States, and the U.S. currently imports 100 percent of its Mo-99 needs.

In May, Markey and Fortenberry called on President Obama to push Russia to stop a plan to produce medical isotopes using highly enriched uranium, arguing that the plan poses a nonproliferation risk and endangers fledgling efforts in the U.S. to produce medical isotopes from low-enriched uranium. Russia said in the fall that it would produce and export the medical isotope molybdenum-99 from HEU at its Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dimitrovgrad, but Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb) wrote in the May letter that the move by Russia conflicts with the country’s international commitments. The experts agreed in their letter this week. “Despite lip-service by Russian officials to the possibility of eventual conversion, Russia continues to expand its production of these isotopes using both HEU targets and HEU fuel, at subsidized, artificially low prices that undercut any U.S. or foreign producer who avoids HEU and abides by the principle of full-cost recovery,” the group wrote.

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