ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 15–18, 2026
Phoenix, AZ|Arizona Grand Resort & Spa
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Paul R. Miles, Jared A. Cook, Zoey V. Angers, Christopher J. Swenson, Brian C. Kiedrowski, John Mattingly, Ralph C. Smith
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 37-53
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1738796
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent research has focused on the development of surrogate models for radiation source localization in a simulated urban domain. We employ the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) code to provide high-fidelity simulations of radiation transport within an urban domain. The model is constructed to employ a source location () as input and return the estimated count rate for a set of specified detector locations. Because MCNP simulations are computationally expensive, we develop efficient and accurate surrogate models of the detector responses. We construct surrogate models using Gaussian processes and neural networks that we train and verify using the MCNP simulations. The trained surrogate models provide an efficient framework for Bayesian inference and experimental design. We employ Delayed Rejection Adaptive Metropolis (DRAM), a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, to infer the location and intensity of an unknown source. The DRAM results yield a posterior probability distribution for the source’s location conditioned on the observed detector count rates. The posterior distribution exhibits regions of high and low probability within the simulated environment identifying potential source locations. In this manner, we can quantify the source location to within at least one of these regions of high probability in the considered cases. Employing these methods, we are able to reduce the space of potential source locations by at least 60%.