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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.
S. J. Altschuler, C. L. Schuske
Nuclear Technology | Volume 13 | Number 2 | February 1972 | Pages 131-147
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT72-A31048
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two models are described for calculating critically safe storage configurations for uranium (93.4% 235U) and plutonium (96% 239Pu, 4% 240Pu) metal. The first model deals with conventional arrays in air of fissile units surrounded by concrete walls. The model uses the concepts of surface density and unit surface-to-volume ratio to define safe-array parameters. The second model makes use of thick internal moderators (i.e., water) enclosing each storage unit in an array. These arrays are also surrounded by concrete walls. The internal moderators partially isolate adjacent storage units from one another and thus, in some cases, permit extremely high surface densities and vault loading. Several factors that influence the storage model are shape and density of the individual storage units and the degree of reflection of arrays of units.