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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.
D. S. Kopecki, K. M. Ralls, E. Linn Draper, Jr.
Nuclear Technology | Volume 29 | Number 1 | April 1976 | Pages 98-107
Technical Paper | Material | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A16294
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Composition changes that occur during neutron bombardment have been calculated for the first wall of a hypothetical fusion reactor. The first wall materials studied are pure niobium, zirconium, molybdenum, and vanadium, and some of their binary alloys. Two integrated neutron flux intensities, 3.8 × 1014 n/(cm2 sec) and 3.8 × 1015 n/(cm2 sec) up to a fluence of 3.6 × 1023 n/cm2, have been used in the calculations of the first three materials. In addition, the composition as a function of fluence (maximum fluence =4.0 × 1023 n/cm2) has been calculated for a vanadium wall. Graphs for each material have been plotted to show the variation of composition as a function of time and/or fluence. Rates of production of hydrogen and helium have been calculated for all four materials; comparisons for niobium and vanadium walls with literature values show agreement that it is not poor. Furthermore, mixture diagrams have been constructed for two binary alloy systems, niobium-zirconium and niobium-vanadium, to relate composition at constant irradiation time to the initial composition.