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 yesterday. 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, so the second half of the application should be submitted by August. NWMI plans to build a medical radioisotope production facility in Columbia, Mo., near the Missouri University Research Reactor, to produce molybdenum-99. 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.
Jobs