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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.
Y. A. Chao, N. Tsoulfanidis
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 121 | Number 2 | October 1995 | Pages 202-209
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A28558
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The conventional transverse integration method of deriving nodal diffusion equations does not satisfactorily apply to hexagonal nodes. The transversely integrated nodal diffusion equation contains nonphysical singular terms, and the features that appear in the nodal equations for rectangular nodes cannot be retained for hexagonal ones. A method is presented that conformally maps a hexagonal node to a rectangular node before the transverse integration is applied so that the resulting nodal equations are formally analogous to the ones for rectangular nodes without the appearance of additional singular terms. Utilizing the invariance of the Laplacian diffusion operator under conformal mappings, it is shown that the diffusion equation for a homogeneous hexagonal node can be transformed to the diffusion equation for an inhomogeneous rectangular node. The inhomogeneity comes in through a smoothly varying mapping scale function, which depends only on the geometry. The steps of conformal mapping from a hexagonal node to a rectangular node are given, and the mapping scale function is derived, evaluated, and applied to nodal equation derivations.