Company founded by University of Bristol develops medical fusion reactor | Hacker News Reader

Company founded by University of Bristol develops medical fusion reactor

bristol.ac.uk

31 pointsulrischa9 comments

FYI: this is not 'fusion power'

"first-of-its-kind Multi-State Fusion (MSF) Reactor which can be used to create vital medical isotopes. These isotopes can be used for killing cancer cells in radiotherapy and as radioactive tracers in the body to help spot medical conditions through imaging."

Medical isotopes have a very short half life for obvious reasons - you don't want to put stuff into people which are radioactive for very long. This means you don't have long to get them from the reactor to the patient.

There is a great article about it here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...

> For PET imaging, the main radiopharmaceutical is fluoro-deoxy glucose (FDG) incorporating F-18 – with a half-life of just under two hours – as a tracer.

A relative recently had a PET scan and I was fascinated to learn from the hospital staff that the radio-isotopes in use are couriered around the country by motorbike to get them to the scanners on the morning of the scan.

So a nice small fusion reactor to make them sounds very useful for medical reasons, if not the fusion power breakthrough the title made me think!

What I inferred from the article is that this is a step towards fusion. During their research, they discovered a better way to create radio-isotopes that are used in medical procedures. It seems to me they will sell this technology/system to fund their fusion research. It’s a good idea. Like - what does SkyLink have to do with going to Mars? Exactly this. (It is funding Starship development).

It produces medical isotopes, which is important (but not what I'd have expected from a fusion headline).

That's why it is revolutionary :-).

I do find this more exciting. I lazily clicked on the link expecting to see another crackpot idea that goes nowhere and costs a lot. Instead, this is a very reasonable idea with real and immediate potential. Neutrons coming from fusion reactions are much more energetic than those from fission (about 7 times), which means more isotopes can be generated. Sure, this will be an energy hog, but the isotopes save lives. A big cheer.

Ok, we've made the title say medical.

These university press releases are becoming tiresome in general and I wonder if we should be looking for a good third-party article in cases like this...

Oh, it's a neutron generator for irradiation, like a Farnsworth Fusor. Useful, but way below breakeven.

clickbait title, suggest adding "to treat cancer"

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