"Our estimates are that [the Maria] reactor can only produce about 5 percent of world demand. It's a help, but not an answer to the problem," Dr. Atcher says.

Still, Dr. Atcher believes it could have been much worse, and credits coordination among the world's three other main medical reactors in France, South Africa and Belgium with ensuring the crisis, though serious, is short-lived.

In fact, the Osiris reactor in Saclay, France, originally scheduled for a two-month shutdown in April, will now go under in June.

"They delayed the repairs at OSIRIS in hopes that the NRU would be back on line before the OSIRIS repairs began," writes Roy Brown, senior director of federal affairs at the Council on Radionuclides and Radiopharmaceuticals, an industry association.

Nonetheless, SNM expects future slumps in global supplies of Mo-99 to rattle the industry, with the next one coming at the end of April, beginning of May.

Lantheus, a North Billerica, Mass.-based manufacturer of radiopharmaceuticals, which along with Covidien, is one of the two main suppliers of Mo-99, says this week supplies will be "significantly lower," but hasn't determined what April's will be like.

"Clarity on available Mo-99 supply for the month of April is still being determined, although we do expect it to be consistent with our Mo-99 supply level for February and March of this year," Michael A. Wojtas, associate director of traditional products for Lantheus, writes in a letter to customers.

Chalk River troubles

Dr. Atcher hastens to note that his projections of a brief supply chain ease in mid-April don't depend on the NRU re-starting on time. As of now, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, which runs the plant, predicts the 52-year-old reactor will be up by late spring. But with welding of the vessel to repair the site proving tricky and the AECL having to bump up restart dates over the past several months - it was originally scheduled to come online in April - Dr. Atcher isn't optimistic.

"My guess is, we'll be lucky if they're online by September 1st. That's my projection at the moment based on how slowly things are going," he says. "Each time they go into a more complicated weld, it's taken longer to achieve something that will pass muster."

And as difficult as it is, this spring's isotope dry spell is not the first. The last major moly shortage happened last August, according to Dr. Atcher, when the Petten reactor went offline for four weeks. "The advantage there was it was a fairly short period," Dr. Atcher observes.


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