Los Alamos built the U.S. supply chain for Sr-82 and Rb-82 that powers cardiac PET imaging and is now expanding into Ac-225 cancer therapy.
Key Takeaways
Sr-82 decays into short-lived Rb-82 (78-second half-life), which must be produced onsite from a generator; Los Alamos first achieved routine production in the late 1970s.
The 2004 Isotope Production Facility uses a dedicated proton beam split from the main LANSCE accelerator; first commercial Sr-82 shipment went out in 2005.
Purifying Sr-82 required inventing new radiochemical separation methods to extract micrograms of product from kilograms of irradiated target material.
Actinium-225 (Ac-225) emits four alpha particles per decay chain, enabling targeted tumor destruction; a 2014-2018 tri-lab effort with Oak Ridge and Brookhaven closed a foreign-supply gap.
Stable isotope work (C-13 for NMR/MRI, distillation columns nearly 700 feet deep) has been transferred to industry; radioisotope production remains government-run at Los Alamos.
