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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.
S. B. Degweker, Y. S. Rana
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 3 | November 2011 | Pages 296-313
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-54
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reactor noise in accelerator-driven systems (ADSs) is different from that in critical or radioactive source-driven subcritical systems because of the periodically pulsed source and its non-Poisson character. In two earlier papers, we developed a theory of ADS reactor noise, incorporating these features. The non-Poisson character of the source does not permit the use of the forward Kolmogorov equation or the Bartlette formula, two commonly used techniques in traditional noise theory. The method used in these papers was a probability-generating function combined with the linear character of the reactor noise in zero-power systems. In this paper we develop the Langevin approach to reactor noise in ADSs. Apart from being simpler, the Langevin approach allows treatment of feedback effects arising in ADSs with significant power as well as other noise sources, if any. We demonstrate that it is possible to obtain the correct expressions for various noise descriptors using this approach. The method is then applied to treat correlated non-Poisson pulsed sources with a finite pulse width including delayed neutrons. The present paper complements and expands our earlier discussions of ADS reactor noise.