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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.
Makoto Ishikawa, Tetsuo Ikegami, Toshio Sanda
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 3 | November 2014 | Pages 335-349
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-9
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Under the International Reactor Physics Experiment Evaluation Project (IRPhEP) framework, in the cooperative JUPITER program between the United States and Japan, benchmarks are established to study large fast breeder reactor (FBR) core physics utilizing nine Zero Power Plutonium Reactor (ZPPR) critical experimental cores. These benchmarks cover a wide variety of core concepts including homogeneous and heterogeneous configurations, clean and engineering mock-up cores of 600- to 1000-MW(electric)–class sizes, and various core parameters such as criticality, reaction rate, and reactivity. Recently, detailed experimental information from original documents from Argonne National Laboratory has been scrutinized very carefully to establish the benchmark model and to evaluate quantitatively the experimental uncertainty. The benchmarks supply users with heterogeneous cell models and three-dimensional (3-D) core configurations, which are simplified to a degree that preserves the important physical features of the ZPPR cores such as plate heterogeneity, different drawer types, and 3-D core arrangement. Further, the benchmark handbook includes as-built information of the ZPPR cores as a complete set of electronic form; therefore, a user can develop his or her own benchmark model if necessary. The analysis of the benchmark with the deterministic or Monte Carlo method demonstrates its usefulness both for improving analytical methods and for validating nuclear data.