14 DAY TRIAL // Nuclear material is routinely used throughout the hospitals in North and South American continent, Europe and Asia, for nuclear diagnostic imaging. As of 18th of November, the half of century old facility, which provides for more than half of the medical radioisotopes required for critical diagnosis, has been shutdown for maintenance.
The world's largest supplier of medical radioisotope, situated about 200 kilometers in the north of Canada's capital city, has been closed in November for a scheduled maintenance. However, though the maintenance procedures should have been over by November 23, because of unexpected problems found at the nuclear facility, the company which administrates it, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, argues that it will be operational by the middle of next month.
The nuclear facility is responsible for producing more than half of the quantity of molybdenum-99 isotope, which decays into the technetium-99m isotope. The nuclear medicine procedure usually uses about 80 percent of the worlds molybdenum-99 isotope, for cardiac and bone-cancer imaging, which doctors often use in order to decide what treatment to apply.
However, the molybdenum-99 isotope has a half-life time of only 66 hours, respectively 6 hours for the technetium-99m isotope, which means that stoking such radioactive isotopes for a long time is virtually impossible. There are only four other such reactors around the world, and none of them is situated anywhere near the American continent in order to produce the much needed radioactive materials.
The vast majority of the hospitals using nuclear diagnosis imaging have been caught by surprise by the sudden closure of the Chalk River facility, and they haven't been able to get their weekly supply ever since, because of the fact that there had been no warning related to the maintenance schedule.
As a result, thousands of non-urgent tests have been canceled, since there is no other source to get the radioactive material, and the nuclear diagnosis imaging could be stopped entirely. Only in the North American continent, more that 20 million patients suffer a nuclear diagnosis imaging test every year.
Nevertheless, the company that administrates the Chalk River nuclear facility cannot be blamed for not doing enough to get it running again, but rather the scientific community, which came to rely on a half of century old reactor to provide the needed radioactive materials. Canada has two new similar nuclear reactors built, which could provide for the whole quantity of radioisotopes; however, they have not been commissioned, yet.