The LARAMED Facility Status Report

Civil construction activities have continued even during the year 2021 for the LARAMED facility, following the scheduled program, along with the installation of equipment and plants dedicated to related laboratories. However, the water infiltration issues discovered inside the SPES building in spring 2021 at the underground level (part of them directly affecting the LARAMED area), have obliged to delay/postpone some of the already planned installations. We briefly recall here that the main goals of LARAMED (LAboratory of RAdioisotopes for Medicine) facility, still under construction at LNL in the framework of SPES project, is either to investigate yet unexplored productions routes for novel radionuclides having potential interest in Nuclear Medicine (NM), or to focus research on alternative/more efficient cyclotron-driven production pathways for well-established radionuclides already playing a key role in NM [1]. To this end, fundamental nuclear physics studies will be conducted, with high-precision determination and (in some cases) re-evaluation of nuclear excitation functions relevant for radionuclides’ production, including the co-production of isotopic contaminants [2]. The driver of the SPES/LARAMED facility is the highperformance BEST 70p proton cyclotron (35-70 MeV, up to 750 µA), already installed in the central underground vault of SPES building and successfully commissioned in 2017. With such a powerful machine, supply batches of already used, as well as novel, radionuclides for further studies may thus be pursued. LARAMED will indeed be dedicated to cope different research topics, ranging from basic nuclear physics, to engineering aspects (high power production targets) and radiochemistry issues (improvements of separation purification techniques). Up to developing and testing new radiopharmaceutical products for preclinical/clinical research purposes, in collaboration with university departments. The construction of the heavy infrastructure has now almost come to the last step, with the successful completion of the civil works, for both the irradiation bunkers and the radiochemistry and targets production laboratories, including part of the related ancillary plants. Waiting for the completion of the whole facility to become fully operational, the LARAMED team has started, since years, parallel research activities (in the framework of INFN CSN3/CSN5-funded experimental programs) on different cyclotron-driven production of medical radionuclides under the spotlight at international level, as well as in R&D on related technological aspects. Details about past and current research activities conducted by the LARAMED group may be found, either in former editions of Annual Report, or in other contributions to this Annual Report. A brief update about the achievements held in the last year, in the construction status of the primary infrastructure, is here reported.