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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.
B. R. Wienke, B. L. Lathrop, J. J. Devaney
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 88 | Number 1 | September 1984 | Pages 71-76
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE84-A17140
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simple temperature-corrected cross sections, which replace the static Klein-Nishina set in a one-to-one manner, are developed for Monte Carlo applications. The reduced set is obtained from a nonlinear least-squares fit to the exact photon-Maxwellian electron cross sections by using a Klein-Nishina-like formula as the fitting equation. Two parameters are sufficient, and accurate to two decimal places, to explicitly fit the exact cross sections over a range of 0 to 100 keV in electron temperature and 0 to 1 MeV in incident photon energy. Since the fit equations are Klein-Nishina-like, existing Monte Carlo code algorithms using the Klein-Nishina formula can be trivially modified to accommodate corrections for a moving Maxwellian electron background. The simple two parameter scheme and other fits are presented and discussed and comparisons with exact predictions are exhibited. The fits are made to the total photon-Maxwellian electron cross section and the fitting parameters can be consistently used in both the energy conservation equation for photon-electron scattering and the differential cross section, as they are presently sampled in Monte Carlo photonics applications. The fit equations are motivated in a very natural manner by the asymptotic expansion of the exact photon-Maxwellian effective cross-section kernel. A probability distribution is also obtained for the corrected set of equations.