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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
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.
J. C. Carter, D. W. Sparks, J. H. Tesster
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 8 | Number 4 | October 1960 | Pages 326-339
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE60-A28863
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This article is concerned with what are considered to be the significant feedback mechanisms of EBR-I Mark III. The objective is that of providing an explanation of the dynamic behavior of this particular fast reactor. A mathematical model of the core and blankets is postulated and an analog of the equations is constructed. The response of the model and of the reactor to the same signal at any given operating conditions are in good agreement. The analog facilitates an analysis of the feedback producing the response. The reactor is considered to constitute a closed loop nonlinear mechanical system with forcing functions resulting from variations in neutron density and the flow of NaK through the core and blankets. The significant sources of internal feedback are considered to be the variation in volume of the uranium and the variation in the density of NaK. Resistance to the free motion of uranium in response to thermal expansion provides the significant nonlinearities in the system. This resistance results from the physical characteristics of the redundant structure constituting the core, blankets, and containing shell. All the equations defining the time dependent physical phenomena are developed from an analysis of the reactor system, but the constants in the nonlinear equations of motion of the materials of the core and blankets are synthesized from low power operation of the reactor.