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Westinghouse, Nordion, and PSEG team up to produce Co‑60 in the United States
This past January, Westinghouse Electric Company, Nordion, and PSEG Nuclear formalized agreements to implement newly developed cobalt-60 production technology at Units 1 and 2 of PSEG’s Salem nuclear power plant in New Jersey, with the Co-60 to be supplied to Nordion. Through an ongoing joint initiative, the companies aim to harness U.S. pressurized water reactors to produce a key medical isotope and build the first commercial-scale Co-60 production platform in the United States.
Brian C. Franke, Ronald P. Kensek
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 2 | June 2010 | Pages 170-179
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-68
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We describe a method that enables Monte Carlo calculations to automatically achieve a user-prescribed error of representation for numerical results. Our approach is to iteratively adapt Monte Carlo functional-expansion tallies (FETs). The adaptivity is based on assessing the cellwise 2-norm of error due to both functional-expansion truncation and statistical uncertainty. These error metrics have been detailed by others for one-dimensional distributions. We extend their previous work to three-dimensional distributions and demonstrate the use of these error metrics for adaptivity. The method examines Monte Carlo FET results, estimates truncation and uncertainty error, and suggests a minimum-required expansion order and run time to achieve the desired level of error. Iteration is required for results to converge to the desired error. Our implementation of adaptive FETs is observed to converge to reasonable levels of desired error for the representation of four distributions. In practice, some distributions and desired error levels may require prohibitively large expansion orders and/or Monte Carlo run times.