Speaker
Description
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA), in partnership with commercial entities and the US national laboratories, is working to accelerate the establishment of a reliable domestic supply of Mo-99 for nuclear medicine while also minimizing the civilian use of HEU. One of the potential technologies is utilizing the photonuclear reaction in an enriched Mo-100 target to produce Mo-99.
In this approach a high-power electron accelerator is used to produce the required flux of high energy photons through the bremsstrahlung process. Due to the small photon cross section for the reaction and high cost of the enriched Mo-100 material, one would want to use the highest photon flux available. That leads to a high thermal load on the target. The ability to remove heat from the target is a limiting factor in the production of Mo-99. A pressurized gaseous-He cooling system was installed and tested at Argonne to allow study of the thermal performance of the target and production of Mo-99. Multiple irradiations of the natural and enriched Mo-100 targets were conducted at different beam energies to study the thermal performance of the target. In the latest experiments production scale target performance was investigated by varying beam size and helium cooling flow to benchmark the CFD simulations. A comparison of the computer simulations and experimentally measured target system parameters will be presented.
