Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff recommended the agency authorize construction of a medical isotope production facility in Missouri following completion of a environmental impact statement (EIS) for the project.
“After weighing the environmental, economic, technical, and other benefits against environmental and other costs, and considering reasonable alternatives, the NRC staff’s recommendation, unless safety issues mandate otherwise, is to issue a construction permit to” Northwest Medical Isotopes, according to the final EIS, which was posted Monday on the agency’s documents website.
Northwest plans to build a $70 million, privately funded facility at the Discovery Ridge research park at the University of Missouri Research Reactor in Columbia. The program would produce low-enriched uranium (LEU) targets, which would be irradiated at partnering research reactors and then returned to the Northwest facility for dissolution and recovery of molybdenum-99, the EIS says. The isotope decays into technetium-99m, which is used in medical imaging procedures.
NRC staff determined the facility would have small impacts in nearly all environmental areas studied, including air quality and noise, water resources, waste management, and environmental justice. That means the environmental impacts cannot be detected or are so small “they would neither destabilize nor noticeably alter any important attribute of the resource,” the report says.
The only exception to this was the finding that the cumulative impact on air quality and noise would be small to moderate, while the effect on ecological resources would be moderate — defined as impacts that would “alter noticeably, but not to destabilize, important attributes of the resource.”
Northwest is one of several companies aiming to re-establish U.S. commercial production of mo-99 after more than a quarter-century. The sole supplier in the Western Hemisphere, the National Research Universal reactor in Canada, stopped production last fall.
