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Investigation of recoil collection method for production of high specific activity nuclear medicine isotopes
Author(s) -
Cheng KaiYuan,
Kunze Jay F.,
Ehrhardt Gary J.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.598690
Subject(s) - recoil , isotope , natural abundance , radiochemistry , nuclear reaction , flux (metallurgy) , radionuclide , hot atom , atom (system on chip) , nuclear physics , uranium , chemistry , materials science , analytical chemistry (journal) , atomic physics , physics , organic chemistry , chromatography , computer science , embedded system
High specific activity radiopharmaceuticals cannot readily be produced by ( n , gamma) reactions in nuclear reactors, because the great abundance of parent atoms remaining have the same chemical characteristics as the produced isotope. We have investigated the effectiveness of using recoil atom collection methods for separating the produced radioisotope. Gold‐198, produced from isotopically pure (natural) gold‐197, was chosen for these experiments, which were run in the high flux( ∼ 10 14n/cm 2 s thermal flux) of the reflector of the University of Missouri Research Reactor. Seven separate experiments were run, with a 2 mm separation between the emitter and the collector. Collection efficiencies were only a few percent of the radioisotope atoms produced in the top atomic layer of the emitter, instead of the 30% range anticipated. Furthermore, the collected radioisotope, instead of being nearly pure, contained a large quantity of the parent. Unless the reason for the “contamination” of product with the parent can be reduced by several orders of magnitude, this “surface hot atom recoil” method appears to offer no practical application for nuclear medicine isotope production.