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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.
K. D. Lathrop
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 119 | Number 1 | January 1995 | Pages 80-86
Technical Notes | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24071
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The cosine of the laboratory scattering angle is derived for a neutron elastically scattering from a nucleus moving with a specified velocity. Scattering is assumed to be isotropic in the center-of-mass system, and the mean cosine of the laboratory scattering angle is calculated and shown to agree with the first Legendre moment of a scattering probability function derived by Blackshaw and Murray. Isotropic neutron-nucleus encounters are further assumed, and a second average is taken to calculate a mean cosine as a function of the neutron-nuclear speed ratio. This mean cosine approaches 2/(3m), where m is the nucleus mass relative to the neutron mass, as the neutron speed becomes large compared with the speed of the nucleus, but for m > 1, the scattering becomes more anisotropic as this speed ratio decreases before approaching isotropy at small neutron-nucleus speed ratios. This single nuclear speed mean cosine is compared with its average over a Maxwellian distribution of nuclear speeds. The two are qualitatively very similar. Taking the single nuclear speed to be the average speed of the Maxwellian distribution gives better quantitative agreement, in a least-squares sense, between the single-speed mean cosine and the Maxwellian average mean cosine than does using the most probable speed of the Maxwellian distribution.