Low- and high-temperature heat capacity of metallic technetium

[drray23]

1. On a related topic, we were asked a few years ago

To work on exploring means of producing Tc-99m for medical purposes. This isotope is mainly produced in nuclear reactors via Mo-99m decay.

Tc-99m is valuable for medicine because it has a short half life ( 6 hours).

There is currently a shortage of facilities where the Mo-99m can be produced to yield Tc-99m.

This prompted the DOE to look at alternative means such as using an Accelerator ( e.g a cyclotron) to produce it. The idea was that if we could make a compact source, we would be able to locate them near major hospitals and produce Tc-99m on the fly for medical diagnostics.
I briefly worked on this but we could not get a funding grant to further pursue it since, meanwhile the Canadian reactors who were the main source restarted.

Of course, we are in the same situation again, as most European reactors specializing in this are going offline.

https://snmmi.org/Web/News/Articles/Imminent-Mo-99-Tc-99m-Shortage-Due-to-European-Reactor-Restart-Delay.aspx


One of my friends is running the isotope program at DOE, I expect we will get a call soon.