Sliding gingerly into the pipe like a worm exploring its lair, the endoscopic camera found its target. In October, engineers at a nuclear reactor in

Why an Offline Nuclear Reactor Led to Thousands of Hospital Appointments Being Canceled

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2024-11-27 14:00:09

Sliding gingerly into the pipe like a worm exploring its lair, the endoscopic camera found its target. In October, engineers at a nuclear reactor in Petten, in the Netherlands, pushed this instrument into a duct that carries water for the reactor’s cooling system. On their screens, they could see the problem: a bulge in the surface of the pipe. And it had grown larger since the last time they checked it. “It’s like a small part of your finger. It’s small, very small,” emphasizes Ronald Schram, a spokesman for NRG, the operator of the reactor.

Although diminutive, this deformity flung the radiopharmaceutical supply chain into disarray last month, leading to the cancellation of thousands of patient appointments. Radioisotopes—unstable forms of chemical elements that release radiation—are a vital resource in medical imaging. Despite this, only a limited number of sites produce them, meaning their supply can be squeezed.

NRG’s Petten reactor is one of just six major commercial producers of molybdenum-99, a key medical radioisotope. Molybdenum-99 decays into technetium-99m, which doctors sometimes inject into patients. It’s very safe. The technetium-99m flows into a person’s blood and collects, briefly, in parts of the body such as the heart, lungs, or a cancerous tumor. It is easily picked up by special cameras and allows doctors to take scans, which—unlike an MRI or CT scan—reveal how such parts of the body are actually functioning as well as what they look like.