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Aug 10, 2009 06:15 PM | 10
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Nuclear reactors save lives, according to the thinking of some doctors. Anti-nuke activists might not see it that way, but when two aging facilities in Canada and the Netherlands recently shut down, a number of healthcare professionals and their patients became concerned, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday.
Technetium 99m, a product of a series of reactions beginning with the splitting of uranium, is used in tests for cancer and heart disease, as well as in some treatments. Once inside the body, the radioactive isotope can bind to specific sites where it emits gamma rays. The resulting images can then help radiologists identify tumors and other diseased tissue.
But the shutdown of nuclear reactors now means less breaking down of uranium, which means less technetium 99m. And this shortage, radiologist Robert W. Atcher of the University of New Mexico told the Times, "is one of the greatest threats to our profession of modern times."
Many worry that patients could undergo unnecessary surgeries, or perhaps worse, miss necessary ones due to this drastic drop in the supply of radioisotopes. While some diagnostic alternatives do exist, these are often slower, less accurate and can expose patients to more radiation, according to the Times.
"We don't want to sound alarmist, but there are many suspected cases of cancer that will have to wait a long time, and perhaps these individuals have cancer," Dominique Verreault, president of the Alliance du personnel professionel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux, told the Montreal Gazette. "This is worrisome."
Groups are now looking for ways to ease current and, potentially worse, future isotope shortages. Proposals for new facilities are being filed in Canada, according to The Globe and Mail. And in the U.S., where more than 15 million nuclear medicine procedures are performed each year, government and industry officials are seeking solutions to ease the country’s reliance on failing foreign facilities.
"We have a moral imperative to produce our own medicines here in the U.S.," says James C. Katzaroff, chairman and CEO of the Advanced Medical Isotope Corporation (AMIC), based in Kennewick, Wash. His company is currently looking for a site to build its first linear accelerator plant for the domestic production of medical isotopes. "It's lower cost to build, less expensive to run, faster and safer [than nuclear reactors]," Katzaroff says. "We should be in business within three years."
This provides some hope for the approximately one-third of all patients admitted to U.S. hospitals that undergo at least one medical procedure employing medical isotopes, according to AMIC’s Web site. But, for many, three years may be too long to wait.
Picture of CT scanner by Trout55 via iStockphoto
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10 Comments
Add CommentThe contribution of nuclear power to health is vast. The greatest area is in avoided emissions by coal stations, which loose huge amounts of pollutants including mercury into the environment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMercury has a half-life of forever.
Coal has got away with a very low standard of emissions control, and does not pay to deal with it's wastes.
Nuclear by contrast is held to standards many orders of magnitude higher, and has huge costs imposed by regulatory authorities which in no way see themselves as facilitators.
This is no way to regulate any business or enterprise, and leads to the US lagging in nuclear construction costs compared to most countries.
In South Korea Westinghouse has built reactors on time and BELOW budget.
It is an absurd situation when coal kills many hundreds of thousands, but is preferred to nuclear, under the guise of absurd 'precautionary principles.'
Neither should it be assumed that renewables are risk-free.
They use vastly more resources than nuclear power, and mining those materials, and erecting and maintaining very high towers are high risk occupations.
Solar panel production is leading to a lot of very toxic waste being dumped on the ground, but again dual standards apply as solar is supposed to be beyond criticism.
Next to the huge death toll from coal having been used extensively for the past 30years instead of nuclear though, the biggest cost from opposition to nuclear power has been the huge emissions of carbon dioxide which this has led to.
If nuclear power had continued to be developed with cheaper and more efficient reactors being brought forward, India and China would not now be building and using huge fleets of coal plants and in the US CO2 emissions from electricity generation could be a thing of the past.
This article is weak sauce. They act like it's the end of the world because nuclear power plants are coming down. It isn't like you need that enormous multi-megawatt reactor to create miniscule amounts of certain isotopes! They can be made just as easily and a lot more safely in a dedicated laboratory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeriously people, if it's come down to inventing reasons to stay nuclear then the fight has already been lost. Just let it go and keep your dignity.
We need to dump the 70's mentality that prevents us (by law) from recycling our spent nuclear fuel. Give up on burying it in Yucca Mt. or whatever place we will not bury it next and do what France does and recycle the waste. We simply set aside our own medical isotope resources while we do nothing at all, which is really pretty stupid. The law preventing recycling was passed so that there would be an argument against building any new plants (the proponents knew finding a place to store spent fuel would be near impossible making it even harder to build new plants). Time to move on past this stupid green mentality and recycle. We have the technology, let's use it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo seriously, don't you have to be able to do something that affects that the long term consequences of cancer (like not having it kill you) to claim that diagnosing it will mean a damn thing? You know the saying, if you are a carpenter, everything looks like a nail, well if you you are a nuclear radiologist, then everything needs something radioactive. It is a turf war, if radioactive stuff disappeared tomorrow, people would still get the same care maybe better as they would be exposed to one less test that will lead to another test. 17 years of family practice I probably did one bone scan per year, that was mainly to detect metastatic disease which by then meant you were incurable anyway. There really are tests that will replace anything that may be an issue (however it is easy and somebody makes tons of money on radioisotope tests like this).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is the correct link for Advanced Medical Isotope Corporation
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.isotopeworld.com/
We use these nuclear/medical isotopes for over 200 nuclear medicine procedures. 80-85% of them require technetium which is made with a reactor. Advanced Medical Isotope Corporation is developing a non reactor method of production. It requires public and private support or large corporations will continue to build reactors in this country to supply these needed isotopes. Along with these reactors comes nuclear waste, disposal, storage and proliferation issues. Advanced Medical Isotope Corporation has developed a non reactor mechanism and a way to convert the waste back into useful medical or industrial isotopes which helps deal with these problems.
Without the medical isotopes then we are totally blind as to whether someone needs coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery or not. If we wait because we are unsure of the diagnosis then the patient is at risk of dying from a heart attack which is the leading cause of death in the United States. If we go in and do surgery then there will be a certain amount of deaths due to unnecessary surgery.
In the last 50 years the advancement of Nuclear Medicine has allowed us to image what is going on inside of patients and not have to cut people open to biopsy. The isotopes help us more precisely determine what is inside us but how tissue and organs inside us are functioning. A short lived isotope that goes away in a few hours tells us what is going on without exploratory surgery and biopsy.
With cancer the medical isotopes tell us more precisely what is inside us and how active the lesions are. Sometimes this differentiates cancer from inactive lesions or inflammatory reactions. Without knowing this then physicians don't know whether to do surgery, chemotherapy, and/or radiation treatments. Waiting for cancer tumors to get larger and spread is deadly. Conversely, blindly doing surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation is very dangerous and is very dangerous especially in sick patients. This includes younger patients as well.
We are just beginning to learn how to use these medical isotopes combined with antibodies and nano molecules to intelligently target only the cancer cells so that there is no collateral damage. This allows more people to survive. The main thing is that we need every possible tool to help these diseases from causing premature death. 50% of us will get cancer in our lifetimes. It and Heart Disease are 2 main causes of death.
Glen C. Farkas, M..
Others are developing smaller reactors that will use Low Enriched Uranium sources but are several years away from development. The shutdown of the non US reactors will cut us off from modern medical practices and put our physicians back into the 1960's which will erase all of the diagnostic advances over the last 50 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this200 different nuclear medicine procedures are currently being used just for diagnosis. A whole host of therapies are on the horizon to specifically target only diseased cells and tissues. This will allow us to start targeting formerly untreatable conditions and those that we don't treat very well, such as AIDS, Heart Disease, Cancer, Arthritis, Alzheimer's, Malaria and many other diseases.
Public support to allow these therapies to become available is needed.
30 years ago patients were frightened with lasers. Now many patients realize the laser is used to eliminate disease and provide better treatment outcomes. The same is true for medical isotopes. They allow us to see what is normally to small to see and to determine what the disease is doing. The same isotopes can be used to target only the disease.
The ravages of chemotherapy have led many to avoid treatment altogether fearing that the treatment is worse then the disease. Killing all rapidly dividing cells in the body has harsh and often fatal consequences. This is why, just as in war, targeted therapy allows us to kill only the unwanted cells and keep the rest of us healthy. It is rapidly improving our chances of survival and the quality of our lives. Before cancer was an automatic death sentence. Now there is hope. Advanced Medical Isotope Corporation can provide our own supply of isotopes without fears of proliferation, reactors, and nuclear waste. This can be done within a year with proper public and private support. Those who want to wait for the big corporations to build their LEU reactors will have to wait 5-7 years and risk the possibility that you or your loved ones will not be able to get the treatment that you need.
There is a solution if we desire. Please contact http://www.isotopeworld.com/
Glen C. Farkas, M.D.
First of all, if these radiological tests are so great for catching at-risk heart disease victims, why is it still the leading cause of death in the US after 50 years?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSecond, there are other forms of imaging which can be used for non-invasive evaluation. Even if your options are limited, shutting down power plants won't deprive you of the isotopes you need to conduct the standard tests.
Third, calling a chemotherapy treatment blind is completely redundant. It's a broad-spectrum cocktail of chemicals that flushes throughout the entire body (hence hair and weight loss). Using isotope-based tests won't have any effect on that. Now if you want to talk about nanobots, well you're about ten years ahead of the times, because nobody has even come close to determining a reliable control mechanism for those, much less intelligent targeting.
Gee, Wally! Do ya think maybe while all this progress was being made we were also getting really fat?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI notice that there are still people in USA who are terrified at the thought of anything called Nuclear .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe thousands of people who have died because of coal production and burning seem acceptable .
Many coal miners die from Black Lung disease ,
Many more than have died because of Chernobyl .
Three Mile Island is usually referred to as an American disaster, when actually the small amount of radioactive material emitted caused no measurable effect on anyone.
None of the anti-nuclear power zealots ever consider France , where 80%
of the electricity is produced by nuclear power.
The French seem to be very healthy , and more than they would have been if they were using Coal fired plants.
That is an inconvenient truth.
PS
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRefer to Scientific American of 13 December 2007 article about Coal Ash being more radioactive than Nuclear Waste.