That's a question of an alternative production method for technetium-99, so I have a few things I could say about that. Let me simply say that the present method to make technetium-99 is to make moly-99. Moly-99 is the so-called generator, then from moly-99 it decays into technetium-99. The present method that's used, I think, is the best. It's the best method out there.
It takes highly enriched uranium, uranium 235, and uses a neutron to fission it, and that's how you make the moly-99. What you end up with is something that has what's called a very high specific activity. In other words, most of the unit of mass you're working with is almost entirely radioactive, so it's very pure.
There are alternative methods that are used. The most common method is to use moly-98 to start with, rather than uranium 235. Moly has two long-lived elements, moly-98 and moly-100, so they're the two you could use as a target. So the moly-98 could absorb a neutron and it becomes moly-99. That's pretty simple. The issue is that the absorption of that neutron is six times less likely than the fission of the uranium 235 that makes the moly-99 with the procedure we use now. That means you end up with a sample of technetium-99, which has what's called low specific activity, so the issue becomes how do you deal with that.
One option is to use a higher-flux reactor. The NRU reactor has about 1013 neutrons per centimetre squared per second. The Oak Ridge reactor is 100 times more intense. So you can compensate for neutron flux that way. That's used throughout the world now in other places, but it's not the preferred method because of the low specific activity.
There are other issues associated with low specific activity that you have to worry about, which is that it gets contaminated in this process of eluding the technetium-99 off of the moly-99 column. You basically take the moly-99, put it in a saline solution and pull off the technetium-99. That's a straightforward technique, but it has a bit of contamination in it, and that's where the regulation comes in.
The comparison of those two techniques, both of which use reactors, is that the present technique has very high specific activity; the alternative has low specific activity. The present technique requires highly enriched uranium; the alternative requires highly enriched moly-98. There's an advantage in that. That's not a weapons material, for example. The present technique generates a lot of radioactive waste; the other method does not--it has very little waste associated with it. You can make some other isotopes with the present method that you cannot make with the alternative method. So there's the balance. You could do it, but it's not as good.
The other approach is with accelerators. I don't know if you're running out of time here—
