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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.
Yigal Ronen, Menashe Aboudy, Dror Regev, Erez Gilad
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 175 | Number 2 | October 2013 | Pages 149-156
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-84
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We show that it is possible to denature the plutonium produced in pebble bed modular reactors by doping the nuclear fuel with either 3050 ppm of 237Np or ~2100 ppm of isotopic composition of Am. A correct choice of these isotope concentrations yields denatured plutonium with isotopic ratio 238Pu/Pu 6%, for the entire fuel burnup cycle. The penalty for introducing these isotopes into the nuclear fuel is a subsequent shortening of the fuel burnup cycle, with respect to a nondoped reference fuel cycle, by ~40 and 20 full-power days, respectively, which correspond to 4.1 and 2.0 GW(d)/ton reduction in fuel discharge burnup.