Preliminary Investigation on Designing and Developing 90Sr/90Y Generator for Nuclear Medicine Purposes

Yttrium-90 radioisotope as a daughter of Strontium-90 is one of the nuclear fission products and plays an important role in the treatment of malignant tumors in nuclear medicine. There are at least five methods for the separation of Y-90 from Sr-90 including: Liquid membrane separation, Precipitation solvent extraction ion exchange and solvent extraction combined with ion exchange method. In this work ion exchange chromatography was used by Dowex50Wx8 resin as a stationary phase and ammonium oxalate, EDTA and sodium Acetate solutions as mobile phases. Separation of yttrium and strontium was performed in the various simulation conditions and for determining the elements, ICP-AES technique was used. The activities of real samples were estimated with β-liquid scintillation counter. The various shielding parameters for designing different parts of generator were also considered in this work.