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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.
Douglas C. Bauer, Claude G. Poncelet
Nuclear Technology | Volume 21 | Number 3 | March 1974 | Pages 165-189
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT74-A31388
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several more efficient and effective xenon spatial control procedures have been developed through simulation research at Carnegie-Mellon University and verification on an operating commercial pressurized water reactor at the Point Beach Plant in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The developed spatial control procedures have taken the role of the human operator into realistic account. First Overtone Control provides an efficient and effective approach with an accommodatable, if stiff, premium on the timeliness of intervention. Overstressed Direct Offset Control (DOC) improves the efficiency of Simple DOC, the current procedure, by managing a trade-off between spatial xenon and iodine effects throughout a shorter control period. Collectively, the alternative control approaches focus attention on causes rather than symptoms (i.e., xenon and iodine spatial redistribution by flux) and highlight the importance of early action to restore iodine equilibration. The spatial control procedures were reliably executed by the Point Beach operators normally assigned to a watch. They demonstrated the capability necessary to exercise whatever judgments were called for in the timing and control-rod insertions and retractions needed. The future growth of nuclear power plants into more complex loading patterns that will induce spatial flux oscillations (particularly later in life) suggests that the premium on efficient and effective control procedures for xenon spatial effects will increase.