New approach yields high-purity radium for medical applications
(PHYSorg.com Physics)

Producing radium isotopes to treat cancer could get easier. Researchers developed a method to recover medical radium isotopes. The process begins with the dissolved proton-irradiated thorium target solution. The process then takes the solution through a series of columns. In each column, different isotopes bind to the different substrates the column contains. With the anticipated scale-up to large thorium targets, dozens of patient treatment doses would be available for recovery from a single production process. Los Alamos National Laboratory`s Isotope Team devised the method with collaborators from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.