Discharges of Nuclear Medicine Radioisotopes: The Impact of an Abatement System

Abstract

Clinical uses of radiopharmaceuticals imply the administration of radioactive substances that are mainly excreted through urine. The Nuclear Medicine Department at the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología (INC-COL) in Bogota, Colombia, administers radiopharmaceuticals for diagnostics and treatment to many patients, resulting in tens of cubic meters of radioactive waste water (WW) every day. As Colombian regulatory limits for liquid radioactive discharges to the sewer system are lower than in other countries, longer WW decay times are required, even when an in-house waste water treatment plant (WWTP) is used. To fulfill the requirements for controlled disposal of radioactive discharges, a complementary abatement system was implemented to retain WW for periods as long as 360 d, and was connected to the hospital´s WWTP. These holding times can cause major changes in the WW physicochemical parameters, reaching levels higher than acceptable. In this study, we evaluate the decontamination and decay efficiency of the retention system using water quality parameters and the amount of radioactivity in the effluents stored in the tanks and the WWTP. According to the results, to maintain the physicochemical parameters below acceptable levels, biological and chemical treatment of decayed WW is necessary before discharging it into urban waste water. Using the principles of dilution, retention, and decay, an integral radioactive WW management system was implemented favoring the quality of discharges and activity levels to the sewer system, with efficiencies close to 100% for WW from discharges in diagnostic procedures ranging from 98% (131I) to 100% (177Lu) for WW from discharges in therapeutic procedures. Activity concentration assessment in medically-derived radionuclides using an in-house waste water treatment plant (WWTP) and a complementary abatement system; an in-house WWTP could be used as an abatement system for short-lived radionuclides; and a tank-based abatement system attached to the in-house WWTP showed higher efficiencies for long-lived radionuclides and adequate physicochemical parameters for the discharge to the city sewage system.