Babcock & Wilcox is entering a venture with a health care products company to produce an important medical isotope that currently is not made in the U.S.
In this venture, B&W’s Technical Services Group would build and operate a facility with small nuclear reactors that pro-duce radioactive isotopes.
Jud Simmons, spokesman for the company, said B&W is considering several sites for the new facility, including one site in the Lynchburg area.
Wherever the facility is built, “It’s good news for B&W in that it further diversifies our business, and we believe it will make an important impact in U.S. health care,” Simmons said in an e-mail.
The facility would produce molybdenum-99, a radioisotope that produces technetium-99.
Technetium-99 is used in medical procedures that detect heart disease and treat cancer, according to a news release from B&W.
Currently, molybdenum-99 is not produced at any sites in the U.S. Also, many of the reactors that make the isotope are aging and becoming less reliable.
Jim Dwyer, a branch chief for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said there have been some shortages of these iso-topes when reactors in other countries have problems.
Dwyer said some commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S. have expressed interest in producing the isotopes, but no one has moved in that direction. “They’re much more interested in power production than in isotope production,” he said.
B&W is partnering with Covidien, a medical products company, to enter this venture of creating the medical isotopes. Mallinckrodt Inc., a subsidiary of Covidien, uses molybdenum-99 to provide the technetium-99 isotope to medical facilities.
The new facility for this venture would use a reactor B&W patented in 1997, Simmons said. It would use low-enriched uranium to create the isotopes.
The collaboration is one step toward establishing a domestic supply of the important isotopes. The partnership has the potential to supply up to 50 percent of the molybdenum-99 used in the U.S., the companies said.
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