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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.
Rubin Goldstein, Louis M. Shotkin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 38 | Number 2 | November 1969 | Pages 94-103
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19513
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
By means of approximate numerical solutions obtained from a first-order correction to the prompt-jump approximation, good agreement is found with exact numerical solutions of the kinetics equations. Accuracies of <0.1% are obtainable for iterative time steps of as much as 1 sec, provided the reactor remains below prompt-critical [i.e., k(t) < $1]. The accuracy increases as l/β → 0, i.e., as the prompt-neutron lifetime becomes smaller or as the reactor becomes “faster.” This is true for both fast- and slow-reactivity insertion rates, C. Two methods for handling rapid reactivity insertion rates are discussed. One (Method A) is more applicable for C ≈ 1 → 50 $/sec, and the other (Method B, which effectively shifts the time scale) is more applicable for C ≳ 50 $/sec. In the one delayed-neutron-group approximation, analytic results are presented for arbitrary reactivity insertion rates and comparisons are made with previous methods.