That is an interesting question that comes up a lot.
There really are no larger players who already operate reactors other than the power industry (power reactors generally cannot be used for radioisotope production) or government-run research laboratories. Realistically there is nothing preventing a government entity from joining the fun, but they will never be competitive. South Korea has spent several billion dollars designing a new reactor model and developing fuel for it (which I tested in ATR a few years ago, oh the irony!). It will be dedicated to doing the exact same thing I am. They've been at it since 2012 and they haven't broken ground on their facility yet. Last I checked the project caught a bad case of NIMBY.
The second part of the answer is that most of the processes are trade secret. If you dig deep enough, you can find a journal article or two from several decades ago, and even some newer ones where a different approach is studied. However, most of the existing players have an optimized process protected by trade secret. It takes a lot of domain expertise spread over several hard science fields to effectively get into the business.
There really are no larger players who already operate reactors other than the power industry (power reactors generally cannot be used for radioisotope production) or government-run research laboratories. Realistically there is nothing preventing a government entity from joining the fun, but they will never be competitive. South Korea has spent several billion dollars designing a new reactor model and developing fuel for it (which I tested in ATR a few years ago, oh the irony!). It will be dedicated to doing the exact same thing I am. They've been at it since 2012 and they haven't broken ground on their facility yet. Last I checked the project caught a bad case of NIMBY.
The second part of the answer is that most of the processes are trade secret. If you dig deep enough, you can find a journal article or two from several decades ago, and even some newer ones where a different approach is studied. However, most of the existing players have an optimized process protected by trade secret. It takes a lot of domain expertise spread over several hard science fields to effectively get into the business.