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Thorium's Rare Cancer-Killing "Silver Bullet"
Thorium-232 must first be made into Uranium-233 and then fissioned in a thorium reactor to make Bismuth-213 as a U-233 fission product.
 Good for dispersed cancers such as Leukemia and dispersed diseases such as AIDS.

The Bi-213 is first attached via a chelator to a monoclonal antibody specific for the target cell, then infused into the blood. The monoclonal antibody then attaches the Bi-213 very selectively to the antigen (a) on the target cell; then the decay of the Bi-213 releases alpha radiation and kills the target cell while doing very little harm to nearby cells. Bi-213 has a half-life of 45 minutes. That means it will decay to virtually no radioactivity over 10 half-lives - or 450 minutes - or about 8 hours. Due to its very short 45 minute half-life, you have to be at a thorium fissioning reactor to get sufficiently fresh Bi-213. 

http://www.actiniumpharmaceuticals.com/index.htm  has a Bi-213 producing product that is currently being used in a clinical trial against Acute Myeloid Leukemia at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  Visit their web site for further details.

Depending on the outcome of Actinium Pharmaceutical's clinical trial and how easily and safely Bi-213 can be extracted from a MSR fuel salt stream, it may be practical for a cancer clinic to build an almost exact copy of Oak Ridge National Laboratories' well-documented, low-cost small 8 megaWatt thorium-fueled molten salt reactor and use it to make all the fresh inexpensive Bi-213 they wanted while using the reactor's fission energy to heat, cool, and power the clinic.  Picture of ORNL's reactor.   Interior    Picture of the reactor building.

A video about Bi-213:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2at8C8YrX80 

"Commercially, the radioactive isotope bismuth-213 can be produced by bombarding radium with bremsstrahlung photons from a linear particle accelerator. In 1997, an antibody conjugate with Bi-213, which has a 45-minute half-life, and decays with the emission of an alpha particle, was used to treat patients with leukemia. This isotope has also been tried in cancer treatment, e.g. in the targeted alpha therapy (TAT) program.  Bismuth-213 is also found on the decay chain of uranium-233." - - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_bismuth 

"The radioisotope bismuth-213 is a decay product of uranium-233; it has promise for the treatment of certain types of cancer, including acute myeloid leukemia and cancers of the pancreas, kidneys and other organs." - -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233 

(Below) Where Bismuth-213 occurs in a thorium nuclear reactor's U-233 decay.

(Above) As shown in "Energy From Thorium's" web site as a treatment for cancer.
(Below) As shown for AIDS therapy.
Image source and background information:  http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm?id=4500

 

"Sign the petition! http://ThoriumPetition.com - We are about to shut down the one reactor in Canada that is making molybdenum-99 for medical purposes in 2015. There are hundreds of thousands of patients that will not be able to get their molybdenum-99 that they need for diagnostic procedures when that happens. LFTR produces molybdenum-99 in normal course of operation and can be partitioned very easily." -