HARDING: Nuclear medicine shouldn't be used as tool in poli

[Oscar]

Nuclear medicine shouldn't be used as tool in politics

http://www.thestarphoenix.com/health/
Nuclear+medicine+shouldn+used+tool+politics/1915058/story.html

By Jim Harding, Special to The Star Phoenix August 21, 2009

Following is the viewpoint of the writer, a retired University of Regina professor of environmental and justice studies.

Premier Brad Wall seems to think that public concern over medical isotope shortage can be exploited to end-run his own Uranium Development Partnership consultation, which has shown strong public opposition to expanding the nuclear industry in Saskatchewan.

However, medical isotopes were always part of the UDP's larger plan. Its report says that "the economics of a stand-alone isotope reactor are not attractive" and that a reactor to do research and development that "is synergetic" with the larger nuclear expansion plan "may also be used to produce medical isotopes...to partly offset the cost of developing and operating the reactor."

It suggests this "could justify further funding from federal authorities."

Just how a Saskatchewan reactor would differ from the Maple reactors that the UDP admits "experienced a 300 per cent capital cost overrun... and have been abandoned by the AECL due to technical safety failures" isn't broached by Wall.

The premier's plan to go after another $500 million for a new reactor project would throw more public money into the nuclear sinkhole. This makes no sense, since the United States government has announced it will start isotope production using technology that is less costly and doesn't involve proliferation risks. McMaster University has indicated it can supply isotopes for the Canadian market, at least in the short term.

Isotopes were actually produced by Ernest Lawrence in 1930, using a particle accelerator or cyclotron, more than a decade before the world's first reactor. Technetium, used in nuclear medicine, was produced this way in 1936, more than two decades before the NRU reactor at Chalk River was even built.

The government did not pursue this technology because of its commitment to nuclear weapons technology, which was later used for nuclear power.

It's time to fully separate nuclear medicine from the old, more dangerous, nuclear technology. We also need a more balanced view of nuclear medicine.

While Wall was grandstanding about nuclear medicine, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a warning about the overzealous use of computed tomography (CT) scans.

According to the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) the use of X-rays in medicine has risen by one-fifth in the last decade, to a total of around four billion a year. The head of the IAEA's radiation safety and monitoring section says the use of ionizing radiation in medicine is "the fastest growing source of radiation exposure to human beings today."

The IAEA warning notes that a single CT scan is equal to 500 chest X-rays, and that such exposure could increase patient risks of cancer. The president of the International Society of Radiographers and Radiological Technologists has said that "there's a tendency to overuse the technology" and research reported in the Nov. 2007 New England Journal of Medicine suggests that nearly half of all scans are medically questionable.

The IAEA recommends that alternative technology that doesn't produce ionizing radiation, such as MRI and ultrasound, should be considered.

If former federal governments had invested in non-reactor technologies that weren't designed for nuclear weapons and adapted for nuclear power, we could have avoided this isotope shortage. If the risks of low level radiation, in medicine as well as along the nuclear fuel chain, weren't so downplayed to try to make nuclear power more palatable, we might also have become less dependent on nuclear medicine.

So let's get it right this time round. Wall's government should stop playing politics with nuclear medicine.

(http://jimharding.brinkster.net)