ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 15–18, 2026
Phoenix, AZ|Arizona Grand Resort & Spa
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Jim E. Morel, James S. Warsa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 156 | Number 3 | July 2007 | Pages 325-342
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-13
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We consider two general finite-element lumping techniques for the Sn equations with discontinuous finite-element spatial discretization and apply them to quadrilateral meshes in x-y geometry. One technique is designed to ensure a conservative approximation and is referred to as conservation preserving (CP). The other technique is designed to preserve the exact solution whenever it is contained within the trial space and is referred to as solution preserving (SP). These techniques are applied in x-y geometry on structured nonorthogonal grids using the bilinear-discontinuous finite-element approximation. The schemes are both theoretically analyzed and computationally tested. Analysis shows that the two lumping schemes are equivalent on parallelogram meshes. Computational results indicate that both techniques perform extremely well on smooth quadrilateral meshes. On nonsmooth meshes, the preserving technique retains its excellent performance while the CP technique degrades. The reasons for this degradation are discussed. Although the SP scheme has proven to be generally effective on quadrilateral meshes in x-y geometry, it is not expected to be effective for quadrilaterals in r-z geometry or for hexahedra in three-dimensional Cartesian geometry. Thus, a full lumping procedure for general nonorthogonal meshes that possesses all of the desired properties has yet to be found. For reasons that are discussed, it appears unlikely that such a procedure exists.