The US Department of Energy should build two dedicated isotope-production facilities, costing about $65 million in total, to solve worsening supply problems for researchers in medicine, physical sciences and national security. That's the conclusion from a panel convened by the energy department's Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC), which approved the panel's report on the state of the US isotope programme on 5 November.

The programme supplies researchers with isotopes that are not readily available from commercial suppliers, and is tiny compared with the vast market for routinely used medical isotopes, such as technetium-99m — which itself is still beset with ongoing supply problems (see Nature 460, 312–313; 2009).

Despite the programme's small size — its 2008 budget was just $32 million — its products are essential to a wide array of research fields. But fragmented and ageing production facilities at the energy department have struggled to keep up with the variety and pace of demands. So last year the department commissioned the NSAC to identify the most important research isotopes and to come up with ways to alleviate supply fluctuations.

Other priorities can sometimes bump research-isotope production to the back of the line. ,

The committee concluded that a group of isotopes with potential for use in medical therapy were the most critical. These isotopes, including actinium-225, emit α-particles that have high energies but low velocities, which means that they are effective at killing tumours without damaging healthy tissue. But shortages are holding up clinical trials, says Roy Brown, who was an industry representative on the report and is director of federal affairs for the Council on Radionuclides and Radiopharmaceuticals, which represents US and Canadian isotope manufacturers. Other important medical isotopes include arsenic-76, used in palliative care for bone pain, and palladium-103, implanted as seeds into prostate glands to kill cancers.

But isotopes are used for more than just medicine. Physicists want californium-252 so they can split its heavy nucleus to make beams of smaller, rare isotopes, useful for frontier experiments in nuclear physics. NASA wants better supplies of plutonium-238 as a thermal heat source for long-lived planetary probes. And germanium-76 is needed for decay experiments that test whether neutrinos are their own anti-particles, which could help explain why the Universe is dominated by matter rather than anti-matter.

Isotopes used in national security often take precedence over other research needs — especially in the case of helium-3, which is being used in neutron detectors at ports to spot smuggled plutonium. But this has pushed up prices for researchers who want helium-3, used in many of the ultra-low-temperature refrigeration systems needed, for example, to study the super-cooled clouds of atoms known as Bose–Einstein condensates.

The report says that supplies of many of these isotopes could be much improved by building two new facilities. One would be a electromagnetic separator to enrich certain rare isotopes; the other would be an accelerator, which could collide different particles to create isotopes that are not found naturally. Donald Geesaman, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois who co-chaired the report committee, says that the separator could be built for $25 million and the accelerator might cost $40 million.

Research isotopes managed by the programme currently come from three places: accelerators at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, as well as from a nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. But producing research isotopes is a secondary task for these facilities, and other priorities can sometimes bump isotope production to the back of the line, says Brown.

Jehanne Gillo, who directs the isotope programme for the energy department, says that the report comes too late to be included in the department's budget request for fiscal year 2011, but could be used to compete for money against other requirements in 2012.