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Westinghouse teams with Nordion and PSEG to produce Co-60 at Salem
Westinghouse Electric Company, Nordion, and PSEG Nuclear announced on Tuesday the signing of long-term agreements to establish the first commercial-scale production of cobalt-60 in a U.S. nuclear reactor. Under the agreements, the companies are to apply newly developed production technology for pressurized water reactors to produce Co-60 at PSEG’s Salem nuclear power plant in New Jersey.
Yasunori Iwai, Yuki Edao, Rie Kurata, Kanetsugu Isobe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 5 | July 2019 | Pages 399-404
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1600932
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A detritiation system (DS) is required to remove tritium from the atmosphere of a nuclear containment in any extraordinary situations. Realization of a DS that does not require heating of a catalyst reactor for tritium oxidation and frequent switching operation of adsorption columns for tritiated vapor collection will greatly contribute to the improvement of fusion safety. Concerning the catalyst reactor, it has been demonstrated that tritium can be oxidized at room temperature without any heating by the developed hydrophobic catalyst. To achieve a high tritium conversion efficiency for detritiation, it has already been revealed that suppression of production of tritiated hydrocarbons by hydrogenation reactions as side reactions of tritium oxidation in a catalyst reactor is the key issue to be solved. We have to pay special attention to ethylene among hydrocarbons because ethylene is easily tritiated by reaction of hydrogenation. In this study, complete combustion of ethylene at room temperature in the catalyst reactor is proposed as a measure to suppress the formation of tritiated hydrocarbons. Catalytic combustion characteristics of hydrocarbons were obtained, and the change in the ignition temperature by a change in each design parameter of the catalyst was demonstrated. Concerning noble metal species, platinum is superior to palladium due to less susceptibility to water vapor. The smaller the particle size of noble metal is, the higher the activity is, but because it is more susceptible to water vapor, the particle size of noble metal can be optimized. It was suggested that there is an optimum value for the pore size of the catalytic support.