Per cent mille

A per cent mille or pcm is one one-thousandth of a percent.[1] It can be thought of as a "milli-percent". It is commonly used in epidemiology, and nuclear reactor engineering as a unit of reactivity.

Visualisation of 1%, 1‰, 1‱, 1 pcm and 1 ppm as fractions of the large block (larger version)

Epidemiology

Statistics of crime rates, mortality and prevalence of disease in a population are often given in "per 100 000".[2][3]

Reactivity

In nuclear reactor engineering, a per cent mille is equal to one-thousandth of a percent of the reactivity, denoted by Greek lowercase letter rho. Reactivity is a dimensionless unit representing a departure from criticality, calculated by:[4]

where keff denotes the effective multiplication factor for the reaction. Therefore, one pcm is equal to:[5]

This unit is commonly used in the operation of light-water reactor sites because reactivity values tend to be small, so measuring in pcm allows reactivity to be expressed using whole numbers.[6]

See also

Notes
  1. SCALE: A Comprehensive Modelling and Simulation Suite for Nuclear Safety Analysis and Design. Available from Radiation Safety Information Computational Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as CCC-785. Oak Ridge, TN: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, June, 2001. Version 6.1. ORNL/TM-2005/39
  2. http://cdc.gov/foodnet/reports/data/infections.html
  3. http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.VIOLENCEHOMICIDE
  4. Merljak, Vid. "Reactivity measurements" (PDF). University of Ljublj. Retrieved September 17, 2017.ana
  5. "Reactivity". nuclear-power.net. Retrieved September 17, 2017.
  6. "percent mille – pcm – unit of reactivity". nuclear-power.net. Retrieved September 17, 2017.


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