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Reimagining nuclear materials for the future of medicine
Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.
Masaki Suwa, Atsuyuki Suzuki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 85 | Number 2 | May 1989 | Pages 187-205
Technical Paper | Chemical Processing | doi.org/10.13182/NT89-A34240
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The pinching effect in a co-decontamination extraction process is investigated with much concern for criticality safety control. To predict the pinching effect, computer codes, such as PULCO, are used to make numerical simulations. Using computer codes for criticality safety control seems to be impractical, however, because some uncertainties are inevitably associated with the calculation due to the assumptions that are included in a simulation code; thus, a safety margin must be taken into account in designing extraction equipment. A new model for inferring pinching effects is proposed. It is based on knowledge that represents the intrinsic nature of the pinching effect and a co-decontamination process holding independent of process conditions. The predictions obtained from this model are conservative, but practical from the standpoint of criticality safety control. The margin in designing equipment can be reduced if the overall reliability of a measurement system in which this model is to be incorporated is high enough to predict pinching effects. The program of this model is written in logic programming language, C-Prolog.