From February 2016 Taiyo Nippon Sanso started to operate on a commercial basis a new plant in the premises of Shunan Sanso (Shunan City) which is capable to produce 300 kg/year of the stable isotopes “WATER-18O” to be used as a raw material for FDG-PET(Fluoro deoxy glucose-Positron Emission Tmography) of cancer diagnosis method. It is TNSC’s third oxygen stable isotopes plant following the first one at Goi Plant (capacity: 100kg/year) and the second one at Sodegaura Plant (capacity: 200kg/year) of Chiba Sanso Center.

As for the production process, oxygen produced by the existing ASU plant is purified up to an ultra-high purity of eight nines, and is distilled repeatedly in the distillation tower. It is completed by addition of ultra-high purity hydrogen.

The Water-18O produced at Shunan Sanso is subdivided at the Commercialization Center of TNSC and delivered after quality examinations. A little more than 70% is sold to overseas customers of mainly Western countries, and it is recently followed by the gradually increasing demand in the developing countries.

Shunan Sanso supplies liquid gases by tank trucks to the neighboring areas as well as by pipeline to the chemical and steelmaking customers in the Shunan Complex with the gas produced by two units of ASU (output capacity: 20 thousand Nm3/h of O2, 30,000 Nm3/h of N2, 300 Nm3/h of argon and 3800Nm3 of LIN/LO2). It is a gas producer jointly invested by TNSC (45%), Air Liquide Japan (35%), Nisshin Steel (10%) and Tokuyama Corporation (10%).