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The Nexus of Radioisotopes (that could be used for energy) and Health Care

There is a tremendous amount of talk these days about the costs of health care in the United States, and if the government should provide a public insurance option for citizens who either do not have health insurance or who do not like their employer-provided insurance. For those in the much of the EU, Canada, and other countries with some form of socialized health care, this may seem a tad ridiculous.

However, a recent article about resources and health care caught my attention. The article is about the supply, or declining lack thereof, of the preferred material technetium-99m as a radio-isotope for medical imaging for scanning for conditions indicating heart disease and cancer. The energy part of this equation is that it takes a nuclear reactor to create the isotope, usually starting from using highly enriched uranium. The article notes that the US is the sole supplier of this uranium except for that going into a single reactor in Australia.

This sounds like a normal story of running out of a natural resource and having to adapt technology to find a better substitute, or deal with using a lesser quality substitute. Except this material is a mine natural resource - it is created from another mined substance (uranium ore) which has yet to deplete. This is more of a production issue, but someone has to build a nuclear reactor as part of the supply chain. I’d say using UPS to ship some Chinese-made hair clips is an easier supply chain to manage.

I can only imagine the embodied energy in using these radio-isotope procedures. Given the cost and complexity of many modern medical instruments and procedures from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to computerized axial tomography (CAT) scans, together with the tremendous amount of research and design of the instruments, the embodied energy is large. Siemens is one company making MRI machines, and the Siemens website discusses results from a life cycle analysis indicating approximately 460 MWh/year consumed for a certain MRI model. An average household in the US might consume 10-15 MWh/yr. So we could operate all of the modern amenities to 30-45 homes for the energy operational cost of an MRI machine.

So how much will health care suffer if we don’t have technetium-99m or electricity to power MRI machines? Well, if you look at measures of life quality such as the Human Development Index of the United Nations, the marginal gain in ‘development’ (of which lifespan is 1/3 of the index) for increased energy usage is very small for the US and most industrialized countries. A recent study Julia Steinberger of the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna, Austria shows how over the last few decades we might be eeking out increases in HDI with less energy consumption. Steinberg’s study deserves more description than one sentence, so perhaps I’ll save that for a later post! Until then, eat healthy and increase your chances of preventing the need for energy-intensive medical procedures, although I have to admit, I had an MRI once for tearing a ligament in my knee, and I don’t think it had anything to do with what I ate that day!

Posted by Carey King on August 12, 2009 4:44 AM | Permalink