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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.
G. E. Miller
Nuclear Technology | Volume 5 | Number 2 | August 1968 | Pages 68-73
Technical Paper and Note | doi.org/10.13182/NT68-A27953
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Eight hundred fifty aluminum-10 wt% plutonium alloy fuel rods containing ∼55 kg of plutonium were fabricated by an injection casting process and encapsulated in Zircaloy-2 tubing. Casting was accomplished by inserting one end of a 0.610-in.-i.d. × 42-in.-long Pyrex glass mold into the molten alloy and then evacuating the mold. The diameter of the cast rods was 0.600 in. ± 0.001 in. with an average length of 38 in. Each element contained two or more of the fuel rods, totaling 47.75 in. in length. Unheated Pyrex molds produced higher quality castings than 1) unheated mild steel molds, 2) heated Pyrex molds, or 3) heated mild steel molds. Plutonium melt homogeneity was significantly improved by changing from intermittent melt stirring to continuous melt stirring prior to casting.