Progress in production of isotopes from US legacy waste

14 April 2023

Some 75-100 times more doses of next generation alpha targeted therapy treatments will be available annually worldwide, compared with today, through a project to produce isotopes from legacy nuclear material at the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the project partners say.

An Isotek employee processing U-233 inside a glovebox at ORNL (Image: DOE EM)

Since 2003, Isotek has been responsible for safely and securely overseeing the inventory of uranium-233 and preparing its removal from ORNL. Since then, employees have transferred and dispositioned about half of the inventory. The remaining inventory requires processing and downblending prior to disposal, which began in October 2019. 

Isotek Systems (a subsidiary of Atkins Nuclear Secured), TerraPower and the DOE entered a public-private partnership in 2018. Through this partnership, Isotek is extracting the rare medical isotope thorium-229 for TerraPower Isotopes, a subsidiary of TerraPower, to advance promising cancer treatment research.

In 2021, TerraPower signed a collaboration agreement with Cardinal Health NPHS to produce and distribute TerraPower's actinium-225 product, which is generated using the thorium-229 extracted in ORNL. Actinium-225 will be used in drug trials involving targeted therapy for diseases such as breast, prostate, colon and neuroendocrine cancers as well as melanoma and lymphoma.

Isotek reinvested funds it received from TerraPower into the project, helping accelerate the work and begin processing uranium-233 sooner. Isotek purchased gloveboxes that allowed workers to begin processing canisters with lower levels of radiation. That approach enabled the extraction and delivery of rare isotopes quicker. This processing campaign, known as the Thorium Express Project, ran from 2019-2021.

An event was held on 11 April to mark the next phase of this effort: providing significantly larger quantities of medical isotopes to aid research and simultaneously eliminating an inventory of 1950s era uranium-233 nuclear material stored at ORNL.

The project provides the capacity to produce 500,000 cancer treatment doses per year. Currently there are only 4000 doses of these lifesaving therapies, known as targeted alpha therapy, available worldwide.

"This partnership is a success for all involved," said Jay Mullis, manager of DOE's Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management. "Through Isotek's innovative approach, we are able to accelerate one of our highest priority projects, spend less taxpayer dollars to complete the project and provide material that will greatly benefit the public in the future."

"Being able to extract potentially lifesaving medical isotopes prior to dispositioning highly enriched material is precisely what we mean when we say we engineer a better future for our planet and its people," said Joe St Julian, President, Nuclear, SNC-Lavalin. "This has created an aspiring mission for everyone involved. We are honoured to be assisting the DOE with this historic achievement."

"Thanks to DOE's vision and TerraPower's investment to cover costs associated with the extraction of selected medical isotopes, the lives of many families will be changed for the better," added Atkins Nuclear Secured President Jim Rugg. "This partnership has created an inspiring mission for our workforce, and we are honoured to be assisting the Department of Energy with this historic achievement."

ORNL's uranium-233 inventory is a legacy of Cold War-era operations and its disposition is the DOE Office of Environmental Management's highest priority at the Tennessee site. It is stored in Building 3019, which has been described as the oldest operating nuclear facility in the world.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

Extract energy from used nuclear fuel, says environmental group

04 April 2023

If existing inventories of used nuclear fuel were recycled and repurposed as fuel for advanced fast reactors, it could generate zero-carbon electricity for Europe for up to 1000 years, according to international environmental campaign group RePlanet.

Report author Mark Lynas and RePlanet's Campaigns Coordinator Joel Scott-Halkes hug a canister of nuclear used fuel at the UK's Sizewell nuclear power plant (Image: RePlanet)

In its new report - What a waste: How fast-fission power can provide clean energy from nuclear waste - RePlanet says Europe's nuclear power reactors "have a long history of safe use, and have provided prodigious quantities of clean electricity for decades". However, it notes that they use less than 1% of the actual energy potential in the natural uranium used to make their fuel and irradiated fuel assemblies removed from reactors are considered 'nuclear waste'.

"While this nuclear 'waste' is not a serious environmental or health threat - it occupies trivial volumes compared to waste produced by other industries, and does not harm anyone if properly shielded and safeguarded - it does provide a political challenge, and is among the most oft-cited reasons for continued opposition to carbon-free nuclear power," the report says.

RePlanet says using this used fuel in a new generation of fast-neutron reactors would "eliminate it as a 'waste' concern via a carbon-free waste-to-energy process". It notes that most of the remaining leftover fission products would return to a level of radioactivity comparable to the original uranium ore within 200-300 years. "This means that current deep geological disposal strategies can be simplified and scaled back," it suggests.

The report found that using a calculation based mainly on current inventories of uranium, "there is sufficient energy in nuclear 'waste' to run Europe at current electrical power consumption" for between 600 and 1000 years.

It adds: "If unconventional uranium and thorium resources are considered in the global picture, nuclear fuel is essentially limitless: sufficient to supply a growing human civilisation with carbon-free energy for tens of thousands of years, and likely far longer".

The report notes that while the economics of fast reactors are currently unproven, if resources currently intended for deep geological disposal of used fuel were diverted instead into a fast reactor programme that would enable the re-use of that fuel, "this would turn a burden into a useful part of a legitimate circular economic activity".

Launching the report, RePlanet campaigners call on green parties of Europe to end their "dangerous and unscientific" opposition to nuclear energy. This, it says, is particularly important given the recent release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report, which shows the world is rapidly running out of time to cut carbon emissions sufficiently to meet the Paris goal of 1.5°C. "RePlanet campaigners state that opposition to nuclear is tantamount to climate delayerism from fossil fuel corporations because it will increase carbon emissions".

"Current political narratives treat spent nuclear fuel like it is a waste product that needs to be buried underground, leaving a toxic legacy for future generations," said Mark Lynas, climate author and RePlanet co-founder. "Anti-nuclear campaigners never tire of repeating this mantra in their campaign to shut down nuclear plants irrespective of our climate emergency. However, we show in this RePlanet report that nuclear waste simply needs to be recycled efficiently in order to generate centuries of clean power for Europe and the UK. This material is not waste, it is fuel for the future."

"The IPCC has again made it extremely clear that we just have to get off fossil fuels, and that opposing clean energy technologies like nuclear puts the world on the path to irreversible climate breakdown," said RePlanet Secretary General Karolina Lisslö Gylfe.

RePlanet describes itself as "a network of grassroots charitable organisations driven by science-based solutions to climate change, biodiversity collapse and the need to eliminate poverty".

Researched and written by World Nuclear News