News

Every year, the Province is informed by NRG|PALLAS about the progress of the PALLAS Programme. This year, members of the Provincial States visited the Energy & Health Campus (EHC) in Petten on 25 March 2024.

On 7 December, Esther Rommel, representative of the Province North Holland, officially opened the new FIELD-LAB facility in Petten. FIELD-LAB will help accelerate the development of new nuclear medicines for the treatment of cancer. During the opening, Maarten van der Weijden, Olympic and world champion in open water swimming, gave a presentation.

Minister Kuipers of Health, Welfare and Sport announced today that there is full financing for the construction of the PALLAS-reactor in the North Holland town of Petten. This is a major step toward realising the new PALLAS-reactor in Petten. With this, the Netherlands will maintain its world position in the production of medical isotopes. Isotopes are essential ingredients for nuclear medicine, for diagnostics and therapy of patients with life-threatening diseases such as cancer.

Today, the High Flux Reactor started up after a maintenance shutdown and the production of medical isotopes resumed. During this maintenance shutdown, an anomaly was detected in the reactor basin. Safety is top priority and therefore additional investigations were carried out before restarting. This investigation showed that the reactor could be safely put into operation and with the permission granted by the Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Authority (ANVS), the reactor resumed its social function today and over 30,000 patients worldwide can rely on medical isotopes from Petten every day.

In the past few years, the demand for irradiation services in the HFR has increased significantly. Especially in the beginning of 2023, the reactor in Petten produced record volumes of medical isotopes such as lutetium-177.

Today, Tractebel and NRG|PALLAS signed a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate to support the new-build of nuclear power plants in the Netherlands. The signing was held at the Embassy of Belgium in The Hague in the presence of the Belgian Ambassador Her Excellency Mrs Anick van Calster - on the sidelines of the Belgium - Netherlands Nuclear Summit.  At the picture from left Joost van den Broek, director Consultancy & Services NRG|PALLAS, Bertholt Leeftink CEO NRG|PALLAS, Her Excellency Mrs Anick van Calste; Philippe Van Troeye, CEO, Tractebel; Denis Dumont, Chief Global Nuclear Officer, Tractebel.

There currently is a worldwide shortage of medical isotopes, due to lower available reactor capacity because of scheduled maintenance and temporary outages of one of the European reactors. The High Flux Reactor (HFR) in Petten therefore started up a day early after maintenance to increase the availability of medical isotopes. 

Preparatory works to enable the realization of the construction of the PALLAS reactor have started. Work is currently underway to make the original access road to the Energy & Health Campus from the 1960s accessible. This temporary road will be made suitable for construction traffic for the PALLAS-reactor. The access road joins the Westerduinweg. During the construction of the steel sheet pile structure around the work site, the contractor KWS Infra will use innovative machinery that does not cause vibrations, thus minimizing inconvenience.

Minister Kuipers of Health, Welfare and Sport announced today, that money has been set aside for the construction of the PALLAS-reactor in Petten, North Holland, in the coming years. The ministry is reserving 30 million euros for the project this year and 129 million euros per year from next year.

NRG and Curium have signed a multi-year contract for the production of molybdenum-99, the starting material for technetium-99m (Tc-99m). Tc-99m is the most used isotope in nuclear medicine for diagnosing life-threatening diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, lung and brain disorders and cancer. With this renewed collaboration 30,000 patients a day can continue to rely on the Petten nuclear medicine manufacturing capabilities.

In December 2020 EDF (Électricité de France) and NRG have started a cooperation on the irradiation of containment tubes. Purpose of the irradiation is to gain knowledge on the behavior of containment tubes under operating conditions that are to be considered off normal. During the last 18 month all the preparations have been made in the concept design, final design and manufacturing of the irradiation facility.

From 21 to 28 June 2022, a team of seven international experts visited NRG's High Flux Reactor (HFR) in Petten on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The aim of this mission was to examine the way in which NRG manages the ageing of its installations. NRG celebrated the reactor's sixtieth anniversary last year, and of course ageing management is an important issue for a reactor of this age.

Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport Ernst Kuipers visited the Energy & Health Campus in Petten on 30 March. The minister spoke with medical experts and the management of NRG | PALLAS about the importance of medical isotope production, research and about the PALLAS-project. Special attention was paid to the development of new therapeutic isotopes and the collaboration with university medical centers.

Over 1.1 million patient doses will be produced over the next month, which will be used to diagnose and treat life-threatening diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

The HFR did not start up on 20 January 2022 due to a leak in a water system. This is a system that supplies water to test facilities, which are located on the outside of the reactor core. The leak was located in the reactor hall, within the so-called containment. There was no risk to nuclear safety, man or the environment.

Environmental Service Noord-Holland Noord has granted a permit for the construction of the PALLAS-reactor and for the realization of the Nuclear Health Centre (NHC) under the Nature Conservation Act. The granting of the permit means that PALLAS can continue with the realization of the building plans on the Energy & Health Campus in Petten. Marco Visser, licensing manager PALLAS: ‘This is a wonderful step forward. Our approach, project specific ecological research, has shown that nitrogen deposition does not stand in the way of the realisation of the PALLAS-reactor and our production facility at the NHC.’

Sietsche Eppinga will take up the position of Construction Director PALLAS-reactor as of March 1, 2022. Sietsche will lead the construction work for the PALLAS-reactor on the Energy and Health Campus in Petten.

VVD Member of Parliament Silvio Erkens and CU Member of Parliament Pieter Grinwis, both spokespersons for Climate and Energy for their parties, visited the Energy & Health Campus in Petten on 11 February. This afternoon Erkens and Grinwis discussed the development of new nuclear knowledge infrastructure for energy and health applications with board members and program managers of NRG|PALLAS.

Eric Cervi received the award of best 2021 Ph.D. thesis in the field of fluid-dynamics by the Italian Union of Thermo-Fluid Dynamics (UIT).

Hans Meeussen (NRG) has been appointed as part-time associate professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences of the TU Delft.

Effective 1 February 2022, Peter Dijk has accepted the position of programme director PALLAS

PETTEN - Soon there will be new treatments for metastatic prostate cancer available, based on the drug PSMA linked to the radioisotope Lu-177. As prostate is a common disease, the use of this isotope will increase spectacularly.

The High Flux Reactor in Petten, from now on, produces only medical isotopes with low-enriched uranium. Until recently, the productions for NRG’s Belgian partner IRE were still based on high-enriched uranium, because IRE could not fully process low-enriched uranium. But now IRE has, partially, converted its chemical process to low-enriched uranium. This means that NRG can take the final step and end using high-enriched uranium in the HFR.

The Foundation NRG and the Foundation Preparation Pallas-reactor (PALLAS) intend to fuse together as one organisation, as announced by Bertholt Leeftink, CEO NRG/PALLAS, today during the New Year’s Toast. This spring, the proposal for the new organisation will be further detailed. “By combining our forces, we are able to make large steps forward in the development and production of nuclear medicines used for diagnostic purposes and for the treatment of patients suffering from life-threatening diseases. To this end, we need to establish a state-of-the art infrastructure that is being developed as we speak,” said Bertholt Leeftink.

NRG has kicked-off the Nuclear Innovation Conference discussions online with a round table discussion and testimonials from some of the parties supporting the NIC.

Terrestrial Energy and Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group (NRG) have started a graphite irradiation testing program at NRG’s Petten Research Centre’s High Flux Reactor (HFR) in the Netherlands.

NRG started a new experiment within their Molten Salt Technology Program. The experiment aims to simulate what happens when the molten salt cools down to below 150 oC.

The Coronavirus has a worldwide impact. The outbreak of this and the accompanying government measures lead to a situation that we have never experienced before. NRG follows developments closely and adopts the national measures that the Dutch government prescribes.

Last month, the reactor in Petten had a record production and was therefore able to continue to provide 30,000 patients daily with medical isotopes. The Corona crisis has caused complications for transport and logistics and due to this the European manufacturers are now turning to NRG.

Amended governance The NRG Foundation (previously: Foundation ECN) and the Foundation Preparation Pallas-reactor (PALLAS) have made an important step forward. The executive board members and the supervisory board members of both organizations will sit on the boards of both companies, via a so-called “personele unie” (a situation in which both organizations continue to exist autonomously, even if the same executive and supervisory boards govern them).

The old chemical laboratory and the old materials science laboratory, of both approx. 65 x 50 metres, have been remediated and emptied radiologically, chemically and asbestos in recent months. In addition to the old laboratories, the south-facing 40-metre-high chimney is also disappearing.

Radiopharmaceuticals are vitally important. That’s why NRG|PALLAS, together with partners like AVL, are working on the development of new radiopharmaceuticals in our FIELD-LAB. With this development, we are reinforcing NRG|PALLAS’ leading position in the field of medical isotopes worldwide. We’ve now succeeded in developing a new, efficient and high quality production process for lutetium-177. In order to meet the increasing demand for this kind of radiopharmaceuticals in the future, we will embark on the construction of an isotope production facility (the Nuclear Health Center) next year, followed by the construction of the PALLAS reactor to replace the High Flux Reactor in Petten.

Nuclear Research & Consultancy Group (NRG) and McMaster University’s Nuclear Reactor (MNR) have teamed up to advance customer service to a new level

Terrestrial Energy and NRG have established a graphite irradiation program that systematically analyzes IMSR graphite behavior as part of Terrestrial Energy’s comprehensive test program supporting the design of Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) and is being conducted at NRG’s facilities in the Netherlands.

Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) announces that it has begun working with the Nuclear Research & Consultancy Group (NRG) from the Netherlands. NRG will implement a program to analyze performance and safety attributes of the company’s proprietary Fully Ceramic Microencapsulated (FCMTM) fuel designed for use in its Micro Modular ReactorTM (MMRTM).

At the end of this summer we reached a historic milestone by successfully concluding an irradiation test on molten nuclear fuel salts inside the High Flux Reactor in Petten. This is the first irradiation of its kind since the research carried out in the USA in the 1960s.