Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Radiation and Isotopes journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apradiso Production assessment of non-carrier-added 199 Au by (n,γ) reaction Mahdi Sadeghi a , Mohammad Reza Aboudzadeh Rovais b,* , Nadia Zandi c , Maedeh Moradi d , Kamran Yousefi b a Medical Physics Department, School of Medicine, Iran University of Medical Science, P.O. Box: 14155-6183, Tehran, Iran b Radiation Application Research School, Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute, P.O. Box 14395-836, Tehran, Iran c Department of Energy Engineering and Physics, Amir-kabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran d Faculty of Engineering, Research and Science Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran HIGHLIGHTS • 199 Au production has been investigated theoretically and experimentally which are in a good agreement. • The chemical separations of 199 Au through the two liquid-liquid extraction systems have been studied. • MCNPX code was used to calculate of the theoretical results of 199 Au production yield. ARTICLE INFO Keywords: MCNPX Reactor 199 Au activity Chemical separation ABSTRACT Gold-199 is a promising theranostic radionuclide for targeted radioimmunotherapy as well as for scintigraphy and dosimetry. 199 Au can be produced in two methods in the direct and indirect routes of the reactor production via 197 Au(n,γ) 198 Au(n,γ) 199 Au as the direct or 198 Pt(n,γ) 199 Pt→ 199 Au as the indirect method. This investigation described the development of a method for the reactor production of no-carrier-added (NCA) 199 Au through neutron activation of natural Pt in Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) at a thermal neutron flux of 3.5 × 10 13 n cm -2 s -1 . Also, in this paper, the activity of 199 Au has been estimated using the MCNPX code. In this case, first, the reactor core is simulated. Then the calculated results are compared with the corresponding experimental values. Moreover, two different chemical separation methods are investigated experimentally in details. 1. Introduction 199 Au is a promising radionuclide which can be simultaneously used in targeted radioimmunotherapy and scintigraphy due to low energy β‾ particle (82 keV) and γ-ray (E = 158.37 keV) emission, respectively (Khandaker et al., 2016; Vitmalnath et al., 2016). The cyclotron pro- duction of 199 Au could be accomplished via deuteron irradiation on natural or enriched Platinum targets through the nat Pt(d,x) 198 Au nu- clear reaction. In 2016, Khandaker et al. studied on cyclotron produc- tion of 199 Au through this reaction (Khandaker et al., 2016). Another possibility and the most applicable routes for producing 199 Au is reactor production which feasibility and high production yield are predominant advantages of it (Hosseini et al., 2016; Vitmalnath et al., 2016). In particular, data on the cross sections of neutron-induced nuclear reac- tions are essential for understanding nuclear phenomena in structural materials irradiated by neutrons. In recent years, determination of neutron reaction cross sections has been carried out by various authors. So, production of radionuclides using neutron-induced reaction can be a good alternative candidate for cyclotron production (Yiği and Tel, 2015; Yiği, 2015, 2018; Yiği and Kara, 2017). Although both the direct and indirect reactor production routes can be followed to obtain 199 Au radioisotope through 197 Au(n,γ) 198 Au (n,γ) 199 Au and 198 Pt(n,γ) 199 Pt→ 199 Au reactions, respectively, indirect method via 198 Pt(n,γ) 199 Pt→ 199 Au reaction could be concluded in high specific activity (Das et al., 1999; Vitmalnath et al., 2016). However, in the direct method resulting product is a mixture of 198 Au and 199 Au with a low specific activity which is not preferable for using in radio- immunotherapy (Aboudzadeh et al., 2016; Hosseini et al., 2016). In this case, Vimalnath et al. investigated the reactor production of 199 Au through indirect method experimentally and obtained about 150 mCi of no-carrier-added 199 Au at the end of bombardment (Vitmalnath et al., 2016). In this study, indirect production of 199 Au is investigated theoreti- cally using MCNPX code. It is notable that study evaluated with an https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apradiso.2019.108877 Received 14 May 2019; Received in revised form 10 August 2019; Accepted 22 August 2019 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: mraboudzadeh@aeoi.org.ir (M.R. Aboudzadeh Rovais). Applied Radiation and Isotopes 154 (2019) 108877 Available online 22 August 2019 0969-8043/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T