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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.
P. Reuss
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 92 | Number 2 | February 1986 | Pages 261-266
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A18174
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because of the large number of heavy nuclide resonances, a detailed neutron flux calculation in the epithermal range cannot be made by standard nuclear reactor codes: It would need several tens of thousands of energy points. However, by using precalculated effective reaction rates, only a few tens of groups are sufficient for accurate spectrum and reaction rate calculations, if a consistent formalism is used. Such a formalism was elaborated in the 1970s by M. Livolant, F. Jeanpierre for the “one resonant nuclide-one resonant zone” problem, and was implemented in the APOLLO code. In practical cases there are several resonant nuclides and often resonant zones of different characteristics, e.g., a lattice constituted with different kinds of pins, a lattice with irregular “water holes,” a fuel element with temperature (therefore Doppler effect) gradients, and so on. Since these problems cannot be correctly treated by APOLLO, a generalization of the formalism was derived. The basic principles were retained, and an algorithm was constructed that would not require too expensive calculations. The Livolant-Jeanpierre theory is briefly summarized, equations for the most general case are presented, some approximations for practical calculations are proposed, and numerical tests on significant examples are discussed.