Between 1963 and 1966, numerous scientific studies demonstrated the use of Tc as radiotracer or diagnostic tool. As a consequence the demand for Tc grew exponentially and by 1966, Brookhaven National Laboratory was unable to cope with the demand. Production and distribution of Tc generators were transferred to private companies. "TechneKow-CS generator", the first commercial Tc generator, was produced by Nuclear Consultants, Inc. (St. Louis, Missouri) and Union Carbide Nuclear Corporation (Tuxedo, New York). From 1967 to 1984, Mo was produced for Mallinckrodt Nuclear Company at the Missouri University Research Reactor (MURR).
Union Carbide actively developed a process to produce and separate useful isotopes like Mo from mixed fission products that resulted from the irradiation of highly enriched uranium (HEU) targets in nuclear reactors developed from 1968 to 1972 at the Cintichem facility (formerly the Union Carbide Research Center built in the Sterling forest in Tuxedo, New York ()). The Cintichem process originally used 93% highly enriched U-235 deposited as UO on the inside of a cylindrical target.
At the end of the 1970s,  of total fission product radiation were extracted weekly from 20 to 30 reactor bombarded HEU capsules, using the so-called "Cintichem [chemical isolation] process." The research facility with its 1961 5-MW pool-type research reactor was later sold to Hoffman-LaRoche and became Cintichem Inc. In 1980, Cintichem, Inc. began the production/isolation of Mo in its reactor, and became the single U.S. producer of Mo during the 1980s. However, in 1989, Cintichem detected an underground leak of radioactive products that led to the reactor shutdown and decommissioning, putting an end to the commercial production of Mo in the USA.
The production of Mo started in Canada in the early 1970s and was shifted to the NRU reactor in the mid-1970s. By 1978 the reactor provided technetium-99m in large enough quantities that were processed by AECLs radiochemical division, which was privatized in 1988 as Nordion, now MDS Nordion. In the 1990s a substitution for the aging NRU reactor for production of radioisotopes was planned. The Multipurpose Applied Physics Lattice Experiment (MAPLE) was designed as a dedicated isotope-production facility. Initially, two identical MAPLE reactors were to be built at Chalk River Laboratories, each capable of supplying 100% of the worlds medical isotope demand. However, problems with the MAPLE 1 reactor, most notably a positive power co-efficient of reactivity, led to the cancellation of the project in 2008.
The first commercial Tc generators were produced in Argentina in 1967, with Mo produced in the CNEA's RA-1 Enrico Fermi reactor. Besides its domestic market CNEA supplies Mo to some South American countries.