High quality Tc obtained from Mo produced by Mo(n,2n) using accelerator neutrons

Nagai, Yasuki; Kawabata, Masako; Sato, Nozomi*; Hashimoto, Kazuyuki; Saeki, Hideya; Motoishi, Shoji*; Hatsukawa, Yuichi; Ota, Akio; Shiina, Takayuki; Kawauchi, Yukimasa

Tc, the daughter nuclide of Mo, is widely used for medical diagnosis. In Japan, about 0.9 million diagnostic procedures are carried out using Tc. Mo has been mostly produced using U in research reactors. Because of recent shortages of Mo, a variety of alternative production methods of Mo or Tc were proposed. We proposed to produce Mo by Mo(n,2n) using neutrons from an accelerator. The route is characterized to produce a large quantity of high-quality Mo with a minimum level of radioactive wastes, since the cross section of the Mo(n,2n)Mo reaction at 11 En 18 MeV is large, and the cross sections of the (n,He), (n,n'p), and (n,p) reactions on Mo are quite small. Intense neutrons are available because of recent progresses of accelerator and target technologies. In the talk, we show our recent experimental results to obtain Tc with high-quality using Mo produced by Mo(n,2n).