Design of Solid Form Xenon-124 Target for Producing I-123 Radioisotope Using Computer Simulation Techniques Available to Purchase

One of the most famous radioisotopes used in nuclear medicine is Iodine-123. Among the various types of nuclear reactions for producing I-123, the following reactions are favored due to the absence of I-124 and I-125 impurities: Recently in Cyclotron and Nuclear Medicine Department of NRCAM, at Atomic Energy organization of Iran (AEOI), a system for producing I-123 via Xe-124 gas target technology, has been constructed and installed. One of the major problems in this system is the highly expensive cost of the enriched Xenon-124 gas. Therefore, saving this gas inside the system is very important. Unfortunately, by accidental rupture of the window foil or bad function of O-rings, the whole Xenon gas will escape from the system immediately. In this paper, by using computer codes; ALICE91, SRIM and doing some calculations we are going to demonstrate our latest effort for feasibility study of producing I-123 with the above mentioned reactions, but using Xe-124 solid target instead. According to our suggested design, a conical shaped irradiation vessel made of copper with 1mm thickness, 1cm outlet diameter, 5cm length and 12° angle at summit can be fixed inside a liquid nitrogen housing chamber. The Xenon-124 gas will be sent to the inside of this very cold conical trap and eventually deposited on its surface in solid form. Our calculation shows that during bombardment with 17–28 MeV proton energy, the thickness of solidified Xenon layer will remain around .28 mm. Likewise; thermo-dynamical calculation shows that in order to prevent the evaporation of solidified Xenon, the maximum permissible proton beam current for this system should be less than 1.4 μA. According to these working conditions, the production yield of I-123 can be predicted to be around 150 mCi/μAh.