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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.
P. E. Labeau
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 126 | Number 2 | June 1997 | Pages 131-145
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24467
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Probabilistic dynamics offers a general Markovian framework for a dynamic treatment of reliability. Monte Carlo simulation appears to be a powerful and flexible tool to deal with the high dimensionality of realistic applications. Yet an analog game turns out to be ineffective for two main reasons: Very rare events leading to failures are not sampled enough to obtain a good statistical accuracy, and the equations of the dynamics have to be integrated all along each history, which results in very large computation times. Recent improvements in Monte Carlo simulation applied to probabilistic dynamics allow a much faster and more precise estimation of the unreliability of large systems, and they are illustrated on a pressurized water reactor pressurizer.