CLS ready to test accelerator
The Canadian Light Source is set to test its new particle accelerator that could eventually produce enough medical isotopes to meet Canadian demand.
The accelerator will be turned on for the first time this month now that the CLS has an operation licence from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. It will be another two or three years, if all goes well, before the isotopes are injected into patients.
The accelerator is only a few metres in length and sits in small room in the basement at the CLS. But its success could radically change medical isotope production in Canada once the federal government stops producing isotopes with the Chalk River, Ont., nuclear reactor, said Mark de Jong, CLS director of accelerators.
“If all of our calculations are right, we’ll produce enough isotopes for use in Saskatchewan and Manitoba,” de Jong said. “There was no facility in the country before this one that could do the testing.”
He added that two or three of the same facilities could meet the national demand for medical isotopes.
Once testing is done this spring, the facility will start producing isotopes for testing at a health centre in Winnipeg.
The accelerator will shoot a beam of high-energy X-rays at a stack of coin-sized disks made of molybdenum-100. The reaction will knock out one neutron to produce the isotope molybdenum-99, which in turn decays to create the medical isotope technetium-99m.
It’s cleaner than using a nuclear reactor, de Jong said.
“It essentially has no radioactive waste coming out of it,” he said. “The quality of the technetium-99 should be identical from what we get from nuclear reactors.”
The facility is the result of a $12-million grant from the National Resources Canada and the provincial government. The federal government is also funding several other projects aimed at alternative medical isotope production, but those projects use cyclotrons.
The CLS linear accelerator can produce larger quantities of isotopes compared to the other technology, de Jong said.
“You’ll need less facilities across the country to meet the demand,” he said.
The CLS project has assistance from the National Research Council of Canada and researchers from Winnipeg, Ottawa and Toronto.
Technetium-99m is used is about 5,500 medical scans every day in Canada, according to the CLS.
The project is being closely watched by federal officials, de Jong said.
“This has been a highly visible project nationally, even it it’s not always in the public’s mind,” he said.
“The government is in a real pickle. They want to shut down (medical isotope production at Chalk River) but they can’t stop until suitable replacements are found.”