Radioisotope productions for medical use with accelerator neutrons

Minato, Futoshi   ; Nagai, Yasuki; Iwamoto, Nobuyuki  ; Iwamoto, Osamu  

Various kinds of radioactive isotopes (RIs) are widely used in nuclear medicine for diagnostics and therapy. Since the RIs are not usually present in the nature, they must be produced by nuclear reactors and accelerators. For instance, Tc is mainly produced by fission of highly enriched U (HEU) in nuclear reactors. However, use of the HEU is unfavorable in terms of nuclear security. Therefore, many methods without U have been studied in order to produce RIs for medical use; for example, thermal neutron capture, disintegration, and proton induced reactions. We also have proposed an alternative method using accelerator neutron besides the above methods. In this talk, we will show the features of RI productions with accelerator neutron which we have ever investigated and found, along with numerical results of RI yields calculated with Japanese Evaluated Nuclear Data Library (JENDL-4.0).