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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.
Arvind Sundaram, Hany Abdel-Khalik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 1163-1181
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1812349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Can predictive models develop cognizance or awareness of how they have been used? Can models detect if they are being manipulated or executed in nonauthorized manners? Can a software track information propagation through its subroutines to improve execution efficiency? Can this be achieved in a covert manner, i.e., avoiding the use of additional variables, additional lines of code, and conventional logging files, and instead rely directly on the physics being simulated to develop the required cognizance? Achieving these goals under the looming threat of insiders is considered an open challenging problem. This paper introduces a new modeling paradigm to covertly develop cognizance that is of critical value when predictive software is used in both adversarial and nonadversarial settings. Given the wide range of applications possible with this new modeling paradigm, the paper will focus on introducing the mathematical theory and limit the initial demonstration to a physics-based model of a nuclear reactor. This model describes a representative industrial control system of a nuclear reactor model containing two coupled subsystems: a heat-producing core and a steam generator. The goal is to demonstrate how each subsystem physics model can remain cognizant of the state of the subsystem. The proposed methodology will provide communication solutions for future reactor technologies to enable advanced reactor control and remote reactor operations.