(Yicai Global) Sept. 11 -- China National Nuclear will put the country's first domestically produced medical cobalt-60 radioactive source on the market for use in China's self-developed gamma knife devices, the firm said on its WeChat account yesterday.

CNNC said the first batch was shipped yesterday from the Qinshan Nuclear Power Station to Chengdu Gaotong Isotope's radioactive source production line for trial production. CNNC started research on medical cobalt-60 radioactive sources in 2016 and produced the first Chinese medical cobalt-60 materials at the Qinshan Nuclear Power Station in April.

Cobalt-60 is an isotope of cobalt, and cobalt-60 radioactive sources are widely used in agriculture, industry and medicine. CNNC said that China has long been completely dependent on imports of medical cobalt-60, and medical cobalt-60 radioactive sources are in severe short supply worldwide.

Many CNNC units teamed up and succeeded in producing industrial cobalt-60 radioactive sources domestically in 2010, the Beijing-based company said. The sources have produced more than 50 million curie of industrial cobalt-60 since their inception in 2010, claiming a 70 percent share of the domestic market and achieving large-scale exports.