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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.
Burt A. Zolotar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 31 | Number 2 | February 1968 | Pages 282-294
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A18240
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The one-mode stochastic nuclear reactor model has been proposed by Bell to study fluctuations in neutron populations. The purpose of this model is to allow consistent space and energy corrections to point reactor stochastic results. The model has been extended to also cover fluctuations in captures and fissions. A time-dependent, Monte Carlo computer program has been developed to simulate these fluctuations for a one-velocity bare reactor system and to estimate parameters of the probability distributions. It has been shown that the one-mode model for neutron populations and captures gives excellent agreement with the Monte Carlo results. Both showed a correction of about 50% to the magnitude of the variance predicted by basic point reactor equations. The fission probabilities required a more careful examination, but the Monte Carlo results could be predicted by approximate solutions to the exact stochastic equations. The influence of spatial effects on the properties of persisting and nonpersisting chains in supercritical systems has also been examined. The one-mode model provides important corrections.