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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.
W. L. Dutré, A. F. Debosscher
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 62 | Number 3 | March 1977 | Pages 355-363
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A26977
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents an exact and complete statistical analysis of the neutron density fluctuations resulting from Gaussian white reactivity noise in a point reactor model with proportional power feedback, but without delayed neutrons. The analysis includes the multiplicative effect of neutron density and reactivity variations. An exact solution of the time-independent Fokker-Planck equation is found, resulting in a gamma density function for the stationary first-order probability density of the power fluctuations. The time-dependent Fokker-Planck equation is solved for the Laplace transformed function, which can be written in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions. The subsequent inversion yields the transition probability density function. The most common first- and second-order statistical characteristics, such as moments, autocovariance function, and power spectral density, are calculated and compared to the results of a linearized analysis.