Concept
A per cent mille or pcm is one one-thousandth of a percent. It can be thought of as a "milli-percent". It is commonly used in epidemiology, and in nuclear reactor engineering as a unit of reactivity. Statistics of crime rates, mortality and disease prevalence in a population are often given in "per 100 000". 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: where keff denotes the effective multiplication factor for the reaction. Therefore, one pcm is equal to: 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.
