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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.
Isao Murata, Detlef Filges, Frank Goldenbaum
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 159 | Number 3 | July 2008 | Pages 273-283
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE159-273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new importance estimation method, which is based on the adjoint function definition, has been proposed especially for the weight window (WW) technique of MCNP, which is well known as one of the most powerful variance-reduction techniques in Monte Carlo codes. The method employs the scattering point base importance estimation, unlike the WW generator (WWG) of MCNP for the point detector function. Every scattering point has an adjoint contribution to the detector, with which a space-, energy-, and angle-dependent importance for WW could be estimated. From the numerical test calculations, the basic performance was confirmed to be better than WWG by comparing figure-of-merit values. It would be expected that the performance of WWG would be well improved by using the present method instead of the current MCNP routine of accumulating the detector contribution for the F5 tally. The presently proposed method would be a strong tool to estimate the importance applicable to various variance-reduction techniques in Monte Carlo codes.