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November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
G. L. Kulcinski, J. F. Santarius
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 3 | October 2017 | Pages 242-247
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1333863
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It will be several decades before the first commercial fusion power plant is placed on the electricity grid. However, there are many non-electricity uses for fusion energy that can be realized in the next 5–10 years when the Q value (energy out/energy in) obtained in fusion systems is ≪1. This paper explores those possibilities dividing them into 3 categories: 1) Commercial Products, 2) Applications for Academia and Utilities, 3) Applications for Military/Governmental uses. At the present time, over 20 near term applications have been identified but it is expected that there could be many more once the fusion community focuses on the near term time frame. Since the near term applications do not require Q > 1, all fusion reactions can be considered. This means, for example, that one can consider fusion reactions that not only emit neutrons (from DT and DD) but also other reactions such as D3He that emit high-energy (14 MeV) protons because they can be used to make short half life Positron Emission Tomography (PET) isotopes. Both steady state and pulsed fusion reactions are also fair game because there is no reason for Q > 1 to be a constraint.