US Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) contractor Isotek says employees have extracted more than 15 grams of an extremely rare isotope, thorium-229, which is crucial for a promising form of cancer treatment. This represents a 1,500% increase in the world’s supply. Currently, only 1 gram is available worldwide outside of Oak Ridge.
“We are incredibly proud to have reached this milestone,” said Sarah Schaefer, Isotek President and project manager. “This is the result of years of hard work and great attention by the operations team.”
This was made possible through a public-private partnership among TerraPower, Isotek and OREM. Isotek is tasked with processing and disposing of the US inventory of uranium-233 stored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Through the partnership, Isotek extract thorium-229 for TerraPower before processing and shipping the uranium-233 material for permanent disposal.
Originally created in the 1950s and 1960s for potential use in reactors, uranium-233 proved to be an unviable fuel source. Eliminating the inventory of uranium-233 is OREM’s highest clean-up priority at ORNL, as it is stored in the world’s oldest operating nuclear facility and is expensive to keep safe and secure.
Isotek began extracting medical isotopes in 2019. At that time, crews processed lower-radiation canisters in gloveboxes. When processing operations began on the higher-dose canisters in hot cells in 2022, employees increased the amount of medical isotopes they could extract and provide to TerraPower.
“As we progress through the inventory, we’ll have opportunities to extract greater amounts of thorium,” Schaefer said. “We continue to refine our processes to keep our extraction efficiency as high as possible.”
TerraPower uses the thorium-229 it receives from the project to extract actinium-225, the key component for treatments targeting forms of cancer previously thought untreatable. TerraPower announced last year it has enough thorium-229 to produce actinium-225 at a commercial scale.
Isotek has processed and removed approximately 40% of the remaining inventory of uranium-233 stored at ORNL. By the end of the project, Isotek expects to extract 40 grams of thorium-229, enough to create 100 times more doses of treatments annually than is currently available worldwide.
