Medical RI development plan of KOMAC

Abstract

Many kinds of radioisotopes (RIs) produced by the high energy (100 ~ 200 MeV) proton accelerators are developed by the foreign R&D institutes and the worldwide demands are being increased continuously. The RI production using high energy proton beam higher than 50 MeV was not considerable because of the limit of the proton beam energy from existing proton accelerator facilities in Korea before 2013. The available maximum proton energy was 50 MeV from MC-50 cyclotron of Korea Institute of Radiological and Medical Sciences (KIRAMS) at that time. After the construction of a 100 MeV high-current and high-energy proton accelerator and a new irradiation facility for the RI production in 2013 and 2016 by the Korea Multi-purpose Accelerator Complex (KOMAC) at Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), we can make a plan for the new RI production of Cu-67, Sr-82 and so on. In the medical application fields, the worldwide demand of Sr-82 is being increased rapidly during last several years and the domestic demand of Cu-67 is also expected to be increased in near future. And alpha-emitters, such as Ac-225 and Ra-223, are becoming attractive to the users in the medical science fields in the future. The RI development plan of KOMAC was specified recently reflecting the recent environment changes and requirements from the users. In this paper, the results and present status of RI production and R&D facilities, calculation results related to the RI production yields, and future plans is presented.