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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.
M. Taube
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 61 | Number 2 | October 1976 | Pages 212-221
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE76-A27354
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fission products 90Sr and 137Cs produced by fission reactors of 30 GW(th) can be transmutated into stable nuclides by neutron irradiation with a thermal flux of 2 × 1016 n cm−2 s−1. The rates of transmutation are 15 and 3.3 times greater, respectively, than that of spontaneous beta decay. The transmutation would take place in a central thermalized region of a high-flux fast burner reactor of 7 GW(th). In the case where the power reactors of 23 GW(th) are breeders with a high breeding gain of G = 0.38, the total system, inclusive of the high-flux burner, remains a breeding system, with Gtotal = 0.09. Details of the neutronics calculations and simplified thermohydraulics are given. The high-flux burner is fueled with a molten salt of chlorides of plutonium and sodium with a power density of 10 kW cm−3. The “self-liquidation” of such a system is discussed.