Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
4/24/2015

Northwest Medical Isotopes has submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the first half of its construction permit application for a medical isotopes production facility, according to a Federal Register posting this week. The NRC received the application on Feb. 5, the posting said. NWMI originally submitted the first section of its permit application late last year, but the company pulled it to make alterations. The NRC issued an exemption for the permit application that enables NWMI to submit the application in two parts within six months of one another.  “We are working on our part two, and we plan on getting it in by the end of the second quarter,” NWMI Chief Operating Officer Carolyn Haass said this week. “We are moving forward with the project, and we are still aiming to start operations in mid-2017.”

NWMI plans to build a medical radioisotope production facility in Columbia, Mo., near the Missouri University Research Reactor. With Canada set to stop government spending in 2016 on the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor, one of the world’s largest suppliers of molybdenum-99 and technetium-99m, the medical isotope industry is expecting a shortage in the market in the coming years, opening a potentially lucrative opportunity to satisfy the market for the medical isotope used in millions of procedures annually. Most of the companies have a timeline to reach production capabilities between late 2016 and early 2017, and with many saying they could produce up to 50 percent of the industry demand, it appears there will not be room for all these companies.