Market For Isotopes Cheers Backers Of Hanford Facility Medical Uses Make Partial Argument For Reviving Fast Flux Test Facility

Sat., Sept. 20, 1997

Associated Press

A new study shows there may be a $6 billion market for radioactive isotopes to treat disease in the next 25 years.

The study by the U.S. Department of Energy is good news to supporters of saving Hanford’s Fast Flux Test Facility, which could help produce the isotopes.

“It seemed like a huge number. It surprised even us,” Arturo Beeche of Frost and Sullivan Co., which did the study, said Thursday.

The demand could also drive the market for isotopes for diagnostic procedures - already commonly used in hospitals - to $17 billion by 2020, he said.

While the study found a growing market in the next quarter-century, that would not be soon enough to justify restarting the FFTF solely to produce medical isotopes.

“Without tritium, this is not going to happen,” said Ray Hunter, deputy director of the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology.

The Department of Energy is considering reviving the FFTF with the dual job of producing tritium for nuclear weapons and isotopes for saving and improving lives.

Hunter, along with medical researchers and nuclear medicine industry leaders, were in Richland on Thursday for a conference on the future of medical isotopes.

The $548 million diagnostic market is expected to climb at the rate of 5 percent to 8 percent a year until the turn of the century, the study found.

“Our question in this study was not the year 2000 but the year 2000-plus,” said Chris Wright of Frost and Sullivan.

Beeche said that by 2005, clinical trials now under way may have yielded new ways to treat prostate, breast, liver, rectal, brain or spinal cancer.

The trials use radioactive isotopes to deliver deadly radiation directly to cancer cells, with far less damage to healthy cells than conventional radiation or chemotherapy.

But for the research to fulfill its promise, scientists and doctors have to develop the delivery system, Beeche said.

Most medical isotopes used in the United States are produced at a single Canadian plant, which briefly stopped production during a strike earlier this year.

Beeche said the FFTF is one of the best potential sources for producing medical isotopes.

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