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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.
S. B. Brumbach, R. W. Goin, S. G. Carpenter
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 98 | Number 2 | February 1988 | Pages 103-117
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A28490
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent measurements in the zero-power physics reactor have been used to study the effects of spatial decoupling in fast reactor critical assemblies of various sizes and compositions. Flux distributions in these assemblies had varying degrees of sensitivity to perturbations. Decoupling was investigated using rod-drop, boron-oscillator, and noise-coherence techniques, which emphasized different times following perturbations. Equilibrium flux distributions were also measured for subcritical configurations with inserted control rods. For most assemblies, accurate reactivity measurements were obtained by analyzing the power history from a single detector using inverse kinetics methods, assuming an instantaneous efficiency change for the detector. The instantaneous efficiency change assumption broke down, however, in assemblies with zones in which normal plutonium fuel was replaced by 235U fuel or fuel with a high 240Pu content. Flux redistributions caused by perturbations in these cores took several minutes to evolve.