Medical Nuclear Radioisotopes

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2025 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to enable the domestic manufacture of medical nuclear radioisotopes.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a privilege to be allocated a slot in the ballot for Questions for Short Debate. While I am disappointed with the small number of speakers, I feel sure that had more noble Lords been aware of the challenges facing the supply of these clever little chemical elements, this debate might have generated a bit more interest. My contribution seeks to address this issue of both national and personal significance. I declare my interest as a trustee of the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity.

Radioisotopes have transformed science, medicine and industry. Their ability to emit radiation makes them both powerful and, when handled safely, invaluable to modern society. In medicine, they are the backbone of modern diagnostics, innovative therapies and clinical trials. They are vital for the early detection and treatment of cancer, heart disease and many neurological disorders. Every year, more than 700,000 NHS procedures rely on medical isotopes and yet, despite their critical importance to world-class patient care, we face an acute and growing crisis in their supply. Currently, around 60% of our medical radioisotopes are imported. For the isotopes that we use in therapeutic treatment, almost 100% comes from overseas. The UK produces radioisotopes domestically only for PET-CT scans, and even that capacity is very limited.

Recent disruptions, triggered by overseas reactor shutdowns and global manufacturing shortfalls, have already led to the delay and cancellation of critical diagnostic tests. Delays can cost lives. Molybdenum-99, a critical isotope for cancer testing, was acutely limited in late 2024, forcing health leaders to ration supplies and to prioritise only the most urgent cases. Between January and May this year, dozens of cancer patients in the Nottinghamshire and east Midlands trusts experienced delays in PET-CT scans due to radioisotope shortages.

This fragility of supply has a very human cost. The root causes are clear: our dependence on ageing foreign reactors, transport hurdles and Brexit-related trade barriers all converge to create a precarious, expensive pipeline for these life-saving elements. The majority of them are produced by an ageing global network: 64% of current production capacity, in 11 reactors, is expected to be decommissioned by 2030. Shutdowns, such as that of the Belgian BR2 reactor, are more likely to occur as global demand increases, reactors age and more research reactors come offline.

The situation is unsustainable but, luckily, neither inevitable nor unfixable. However, it requires the Government and the scientific community to explore and pursue long-term solutions—not an easy ask in times of serious budget constraints—where cross-departmental co-operation is key. I note that it is the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, responding as Minister for Health, but it could as appropriately have been a Minister from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Department for Business and Trade or indeed the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

Any long-term solution must have at its core a vision for a secure, sovereign supply chain anchored in world-leading research, agile infrastructure and a skilled workforce. As well as direct benefits, research reactors have been demonstrated to create technological clusters that attract investment as industry benefits from proximity, which reduces the loss of radioactivity due to decay, and highly skilled expertise is built up in a local workforce. But the supply chain challenges for molecular radiotherapy stem from the fact that the radioactive component—the radionuclides—are short lived, so must be made continuously and cannot be stockpiled.

Where could we build a reactor where there is already a suitable nuclear site, owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, with a highly skilled local workforce in the relevant nuclear and medical sciences, a welcoming population well educated in the advantages of living in close proximity to a nuclear site, and an airfield almost adjacent to export the radionuclides with short half-lives—more likely to be counted in hours, not days—to the UK and beyond? Extensive research by the Snowdonia Enterprise Zone, backed by the Welsh Government, assessed long-term economic uses for the Trawsfynydd site in south Gwynedd. Given the site’s heritage, it concluded that it is most suited for nuclear development. Following detailed assessments of a number of different options, two projects were confirmed as having the greatest potential to deliver socioeconomic benefits, namely SMRs and a medical research reactor to produce radioisotopes for cancer diagnostics treatment and research.

The proposed ARTHUR—advanced radioisotope technology for health utility reactor—initiative envisages a dedicated medical reactor capable of producing a steady flow of radioisotopes for NHS use and research, and for export. The recommended reactor design for the ARTHUR project would use proven technology and is modelled on the ANSTO OPAL reactor, the world’s leading example for secure and efficient medical isotope production. The plan is supported by leading academic voices. Professor Simon Middleburgh of Bangor University’s Nuclear Futures Institute has stated that

“such a facility is not simply a Welsh inspiration—it is a UK wide imperative. Without it we remain at the mercy of foreign reactors, rising costs and global shocks”.

In 2022 the Government took a step in the right direction by announcing a £6 million medical radionuclide innovation programme. The commissioned report, issued by TÜV SÜD, warned of a supply vulnerable to technological failures, infrastructure delays and geopolitical upheaval, underscoring the conclusion that our current system is not future-proof. The recent review of molecular radiotherapy services produced by the Royal College of Radiologists, the Royal College of Physicians, the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine and the British Nuclear Medicine Society made one key recommendation: that every devolved Government and every radiotherapy operational delivery network in England appoint a molecular radiotherapy champion, someone with the mandate and vision to drive the change we need. By investing in infrastructure using the existing workforce, as well as training the workforce of tomorrow, we can become self-reliant and once again lead the world in nuclear medicine innovation.

One in two UK citizens will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. Many will see their quality of life and the efficacy of their treatments enhanced as a result of nuclear medicine. Every hospital in the UK uses it to help patients on a daily basis—700,000 patients a year and counting. We must act now. Let us not wait for another global shortage, another shutdown or another delayed shipment to force us into crisis mode. Let us choose instead to build a secure, resilient, sovereign supply of medical isotopes for the UK and, of course, I hope that will be in Wales.