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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
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.
Han Gyu Joo, Jae-Jun Jeong, Byung-Oh Cho, Won Jae Lee, Sung Quun Zee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 142 | Number 2 | May 2003 | Pages 166-179
Technical Paper | OECD/NRC MSLB Benchmark | doi.org/10.13182/NT142-166
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The refined core thermal-hydraulics (T-H) nodalization feature of the MARS/MASTER code is used to generate a high-fidelity solution to the OECD main steam line break benchmark problem and to investigate the effects of core T-H nodalization. The MARS/MASTER coupling scheme is introduced first that enables efficient refined node core T-H calculations via the COBRA-III module. The base solution is generated using a fine T-H nodalization consisting of fuel assembly-sized radial nodes. Sensitivity studies are performed on core T-H nodalization to examine the impacts on core reactivity, power distribution, and transient behavior. The results indicate that the error in the peak local power can be very large (up to 25%) with a coarse T-H nodalization because of the inability to incorporate detailed thermal feedback. A demonstrative departure from nucleate boiling (DNB) calculation shows no occurrence of DNB in this problem.