[atomicalchemy]

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.