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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.
Taro Ueki, Edward W. Larsen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 130 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 269-291
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE98-A2006
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new Boltzmann Monte Carlo (BMC) equation is proposed to describe the transport of Monte Carlo particles governed by a set of nonanalog rules for the transition of space, velocity, and weight. The BMC equation is a kinetic equation that includes weight as an extra independent variable. The solution of the BMC equation is the pointwise distribution of velocity and weight throughout the physical system. The BMC equation is derived for the simulation of a transmitted current, utilizing the exponential transform with angular biasing. The weight moments of the solution of the BMC equation are used to predict the score moments of the transmission current. (Also, it is shown that an adjoint BMC equation can be used for this purpose.) Integrating the solution of the forward BMC equation over space, velocity, and weight, the mean number of flights per history is obtained. This is used to determine theoretically the figure of merit for any choice of biasing parameters. Also, a maximum safe value of the exponential transform parameter is proposed, which ensures the finite variance of variance estimate (sample variance) for any penetration distance. Finally, numerical results that validate the new theory are provided.