PROTEUS - Proton production of medical radioisotopes for Enhanced Utilization and Supply

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Describe the research in simple terms in a way that could be publicised to a general audience. This will be made publicly available, and Applicants are responsible for ensuring that the content is suitable for publication. No more than, 4000 characters between 1 and 2 Pages including spaces and returns.In the UK, the supply of medical radioisotopes to support the NHS is in a critically poor condition. Anticipated disruptions in the global and European supply chain for medical radioisotopes are furthermore expected to worsen this situation as many research reactors across Europe are scheduled to be retired by 2030. Because the UK lacks a domestic research reactor to natively compensate for the reduced international production capacity, the risk of further radioisotope shortages will increase both prices and pressure on the NHS. Because of the high capital investment necessary to replace ageing reactors as well as decadal timescales for planning and construction, alternative supply chains are urgently needed.The UK's globally leading position in fusion research opens up a valuable opportunity to address this problem by using fusion technology as a radiation source for nuclear transmutation. Inertial electrostatically confined fusion (IECF) uses electric fields rather than magnetic fields to confine a hydrogen/helium plasma mixture, and electrostatic acceleration of ions provides the kinetic energy to enable fusing of such light elements. IECF technology was developed in the 1960s and is well understood, with dozens of universities building demonstration systems for research purposes to produce a variety of high energy particles. At the University of Bristol (UoB), a more sophisticated system was designed as an open source hardware particle accelerator capable of producing both neutron and proton radiation for materials research and transmutation experiments. Funded by the STFC under the CLASP scheme, this particle accelerator, referred to as B34, is the ideal platform to explore the viability of compact IECF devices as a technical pathway towards cheaper and more local medical radioisotope production.The B34 system is designed to produce protons at sufficiently high fluxes to make production of light medical isotopes possible. The system utilises fusion reactions between deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) and Helium-3 (the light isotope of helium) to produce protons, which are much easier to shield than the neutrons that are produced by other types of fusion reaction. This means that with further development, the B34 could form the basis for a compact and cheap commercial device for producing medical isotopes in hospitals - right where the isotopes are needed. This would be a substantial game-changer for the NHS and for the medical sector more widely. At the end of the project, the efficiency of nuclear transmutation through IECF proton irradiation will be sufficiently understood to assess economic viability in comparison to other alternatives such as linear accelerator or cyclotron-type particle accelerators.