U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) have joined a number of state and local officials in voicing support for an Oregon company’s plans to build and operate a medical isotope production plant in Missouri.
Corvallis-based Northwest Medical Isotopes (NWMI) plans to build a 70,000-square-foot facility at the Discovery Ridge Research Park in Columbia. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scheduled a Jan. 23 evidentiary hearing on the company’s application for a construction permit for the molybdenum-99 production facility. With approval from the commission and other regulatory bodies, NWMI management hopes to begin work on the site later this year and begin operations in 2020.
Wyden and McCaskill noted in a Dec. 14 letter to the three sitting NRC commissioners that the United States has no current domestic capacity for manufacturing molybdenum-99, which decays into technetium-99m, an isotope used in medical imaging for cancer and other diseases. The NWMI plant is expected to provide roughly 50 percent of U.S. demand, the lawmakers said.
“The issuance of a construction permit for this facility would be a significant milestone in obtaining a domestic supply for this important national radiopharmaceutical technology,” Wyden and McCaskill wrote.
A number of officials in Missouri were similarly supportive in letters to the NRC.
“The project falls within the strategic plans for the State of Missouri in that it creates employment at a high wage and investment that will provide great benefit to the local taxing entities,” Terrance Maglich, project manager at the Missouri Department of Economic Research, wrote in a Dec. 12 letter. “The project will also create a product that can save lives and possibly add to the development of other lifesaving medical products.”
Ahead of the upcoming hearing, NRC staff and NWMI have also submitted long lists of answers to pre-hearing questions from the commission.
