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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.
Wayne K. Lehto, John M. Carpenter
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 33 | Number 2 | August 1968 | Pages 225-237
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A20660
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fission rate fluctuations at low power in a reactor with a large fission-product inventory have been observed in the pool-type Ford Nuclear Reactor. A gaseous Cerenkov detector was used to sense the high-energy, prompt-fission gamma rays in the presence of a fission-product gamma field of 105 to 106 R/h. The ratio β/l is determined from the cross power spectral density of the fluctuations in the signals from two of these detectors. Both this spectrum and the power spectral density of the output of a single detector show a large low-frequency component. This is attributed to moderator temperature fluctuations present when the fission-product decay heat is removed by natural circulation of the coolant. The temperature fluctuations as measured with a short-time-constant thermocouple are shown to be correlated to those in the fission rate. The detector is described, as well as a basis for calculating its performance and efficiency. A theory of the gamma noise experiment that reveals the effects of the detector on the measured spectrum is presented.