Technetium is a test case for the "isotope market with no element market" pattern. No one trades technetium as a metal; the entire industrial reality is the Tc-99m medical imaging supply chain, supported by the 6-hour half-life Tc-99m daughter of 66-hour Mo-99 eluted from generator columns at hospital pharmacies. The supply chain bottleneck is research reactor availability, not ore grade: roughly 8 reactors worldwide (HFR Petten, BR2 Mol, Maria Warsaw, SAFARI-1, OPAL, MPR RSG-GAS, RA-3, LVR-15) irradiate uranium targets to produce Mo-99 which is then chemically separated and shipped to generator manufacturers. The late-2024 HFR pipe-deformation incident caused a ~50% global Mo-99 supply shortfall for three weeks, illustrating how fragile the system is when multiple reactors schedule overlapping maintenance windows.