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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.
Jin-Yang Li, Long Gu, Hu-Shan Xu, Yong Dai, You-Peng Zhang, Cun-Feng Yao, Rui Yu, Lu Zhang, Sheng Yang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 270-284
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1757963
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To study the burnup features of accelerator-driven subcritical systems (ADSs), simplified transmutation trajectories are imperative to make the simulation process more effective with acceptable precision. This process has long been considered a challenging task since the construction of simplified burnup chains often need complex judgments and experiences. Additionally, the burnup analysis of ADSs requires more specific burnup chains for some important isotopes with minor actinides (MAs) and long-lived fission products (LLFPs) included. However, some general burnup codes lack these chains or pack some particularly important isotopes into a kind of pseudo nuclide. In this context, a PyNE-based burnup module (PyNE-Burn) has been developed to solve the burnup problem in ADSs, where three types of isotopes have been considered to construct the simplified burnup chains and weight-sorted judgment criteria have been proposed to determine which nuclides should be included. Moreover, the scan-mode-method-based high-order differential expression has been employed to substitute the legacy method in solving the linearized burnup chains. Finally, numerical tests have been carried out to demonstrate that the PyNE-Burn module has acceptable accuracy and can be used in dealing with the burnup problem in ADSs.