http://nuclearrc.sa.gov.au/app/uplo...s/151015-topic-8-day-1-transcript-full.v2.pdf
DR GOLDSWORTHY: The first comment is that the technology we're using for uranium enrichment is quite specific to uranium.
"The technology that we have used to investigate enrichment of other molecules is fundamentally quite different."
The basic reason is uranium is a very heavy atom. It has very different properties to these lighter elements that we've also looked at over the years.
We've looked at enrichment of molybdenum, silicon, oxygen, carbon in 35 actual lab work and then we've done paper studies of other isotopes as well. We've enriched some of these elements in the past.
So there's the clear distinction that the technology that we use for uranium is quite different to the laser enrichment technology that we've used for the lighter elements.
Having said that, we've looked at the markets for these lighter elements and we've done some work on molybdenum. Molybdenum was used for production of technetium-99 which is the most widely used medical isotope today by a long way. That market is growing quite significantly as nuclear medicine becomes more broadly used around the world. So we have started looking again at the possibility of a molybdenum production facility. So technetium-99 has traditionally been produced by molybdenum-99 which is extracted from spent nuclear fuel out of a nuclear power reactor.
There's a move more recently to go away from that method of production because particularly the US government is concerned about, well, if you're going to start extracting things from spent fuel then it raises the proliferation question because inside that spent fuel is also some plutonium.
So the US government is leading an effort around the world to move away from spent fuel production of molybdenum-99 to either target irradiated molybdenum-99 10 production or accelerator produced molybdenum-99.
Target irradiation involves putting a lug of molybdenum inside a reactor. The neutron is absorbed inside the molybdenum-98 isotope and becomes molybdenum-99.
The problem is molybdenum-98 is only about 24 per cent of natural 15 molybdenum.
It's about a quarter of natural molybdenum. So if we enriched molybdenum-98 up towards 90 and 100 per cent you'll get a four times yield from that process. So efficiency is straightaway up four times and cost, hopefully, down four times.
The alternative is to irradiate molybdenum-100 which is about 10 per cent of natural in a cyclotron, an accelerator, proton 20 absorption, and that will then decay to molybdenum-99.
So the targets for that are also inefficient. Only 10 per cent of the target would go through that process.
If we enriched the molybdenum-100 to between 90 and 100 per cent then that process would be improved 10-fold, roughly speaking. So the efficiency and the economics would improve, hopefully, by the same measure.
So there is some work we are looking at with molybdenum. The market is still growing. It's not as big as the uranium market, of course. It's maybe $200 million a year at a guess but I'd have to check on that number.
Again, it's very hard to find out exactly what the size of these markets are.
Maybe you've been 30 having more success than us but we think it's a few hundred million dollars, growing at the moment.
That starts to get interesting in terms of the benefit that you could bring to technetium production and molybdenum-99 production.
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