Isotope Harvesting at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB)

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During routine heavy-ion beam irradiations at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB),

interactions between the beam and the facility’s flowing-water beam dump will generate large

quantities of useful radioactive byproducts. My group has followed up earlier research,

spearheaded largely by researchers at Wash U (Lapi, Mastren et al.), to demonstrate the feasibility

of recovering those byproduct radionuclides in a process termed “isotope harvesting”. Through

irradiations of a prototype beam dump at FRIB’s predecessor facility, the National

Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, we successfully harvested and purified 47Ca, 76Kr, and

62Zn, and used them to generate pure samples of the medically relevant radioisotopes 47Sc, 76Br,

and 62Cu. We are currently integrating infrastructure into FRIB that will allow large scale

harvesting of a wide variety of additional radionuclides. When FRIB begins its experimental

program in 2022, we anticipate providing research quantities of purified radionuclides for applied

research in fields ranging from nuclear medicine and horticulture to nuclear data and nuclear

security.