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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. R. Handley
Nuclear Technology | Volume 14 | Number 1 | April 1972 | Pages 71-75
Technical Paper | Session on Physics of Nuclear Materials Safeguards / Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT72-A31100
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The criticality safety of water-sprinkled arrays of enriched uranium metal on 20-in. center-to-center spacing was investigated using KENO, a multigroup Monte Carlo criticality calculation program. The effects of array size and unit apparent density on the optimum-density interspersed water moderation were analyzed. It was shown that larger arrays of enriched uranium require a lower density of interspersed hydrogenous moderator for optimum moderation than do similar smaller arrays. Also, it was shown that when the density of dry uranium metal units is decreased from full density without changing the mass or the center-to-center spacing of the units, while maintaining optimum interspersed hydrogenous moderation, the neutron multiplication of the array at first decreases, then increases beyond that of the array of full density units. The initial decrease of the neutron multiplication of the array may not be true in general for all arrays.