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International conference on isotopes opens in Moscow

It is expected that the conference that will last till September 8 will be attended by Sergei Kiriyenko and Arkady Dvorkovich

MOSCOW, September 5 (Itar-Tass) —— An international conference on isotopes opened at the Moscow-based International Trade Centre on Monday. More than 500 experts from 31 world nations are taking part.

It is expected that the conference that will last till September 8 will be attended by Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of Russia’s state nuclear concern Rosatom, and Arkady Dvorkovich, an aide to the Russian president, the conference’s press centre said.

It will be the seventh such conference and the fact that Russia was chosen as its venue testifies to its high authority in the global nuclear community, said Mikhail Batkov, the director of Rosatom’s Radiation Technologies program. “Russia is one of the founders of the isotope industry,” he said.

The conference’s organizers are the World Council of Isotopes (WCI), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK-CEN), the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO), and a number of other world’s leading isotope manufacturers.

Along with plenary meetings, workshops and an exhibition of the latest isotope-making equipment, the program of the conference features a “business program to discuss ways to create favourable investment climate, to expand isotope use areas and to boost production facilities,” the Rosatom official said. “The use of such a format of the conference is quite logical when science and business are coming closer to each other both in Russia and globally,” he added.

Produced by nuclear units, isotopes are widely used in medicine, agriculture, environment protection and security areas, in archaeology, geology, space research, etc. According to experts, of vital importance now is to boost the production of molybdenum-99 and its radioactive product, technecium-99, used for treating cancer and making diagnostic procedures.

The conferences on isotopes have been held every three years in various countries across the globe since 1995. The last such conference was held in 2008 in Seoul, South Korea.