SNMMI Issues Alert That HFR Outage Will Impact Isotope Supply

January 26, 2022 — On January 24, the Emergency Response Team (ERT) of Nuclear Medicine Europe (NMEu) communicated that there will be a delay in the restart of the HFR Reactor that will impact the supply of Mo-99 and Lu-177 in coming weeks.

The delay is due to discovery of a water leak in the reactor beam tube cooling system. The NRG, which operates the HFR reactor, has not yet been able to discover the root cause of the leak and has put a project team in place to determine a plan of action; additional inspections are expected this week. After the root cause is discovered and repaired, regulatory review and approval must take place before the reactor can resume service.

HFR was scheduled to produce both Mo-99 and Lu-117 this week, so the delay will impact supply in coming weeks. “Medical institutions should contact their radioisotope suppliers to determine the specific impact on their orders,” per the communication from the ERT.

You can view the complete letter issued by the NMEu here.

An update to this article can be found here.

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