Investigating the in-core 60Co production assembly for open pool type reactor

Abstract Production of high specific 60Co activity in nuclear research reactor needs long time of irradiation to reach the proper consumer demands. Cobalt device is a fixed experiment inside the core of the second research reactor (ETRR-2) that designed for production of 60Co with activity of 50,000 Ci. Cobalt device is assembly of 16 pins of aluminum cans that filling with the cobalt foils. Utilizing the programs that depend on the Monte Carlo method to estimate 60Co activity is the objective of this study. MCNP6, KENO-VI, and MAVRIC codes would be used to evaluate the time that the cobalt device has been spent inside the reactor core for reaching the proper 60Co activity considering the continuous irradiation as well as the discrete irradiation. The calculations show that nearly one year of continuous neutron irradiation is sufficient for reaching the required activity. In case of discrete irradiation, the time required for reaching the required activity would be more than a year depending on the reactor operation period.