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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.
Gunji Nisio, Motoe Suzuki, Shigeo Mukaide, Junichi Takada, Michio Tsukamoto, Tadao Koike
Nuclear Technology | Volume 95 | Number 3 | September 1991 | Pages 325-336
Technical Paper | Enrichment and Reprocessing System | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34581
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A nuclear fuel reprocessing plant is equipped with an air ventilation system consisting of cells, ducts, dampers, high-efficiency particulate air filters, and blowers. This ventilation system is required to have multiple safeguards in order to confine airborne radioactive materials within the plant in the event of fire, explosion, and criticality. To evaluate these safeguards, three kinds of explosive burning tests are performed using a large-scale facility simulating the ventilation system of a reprocessing plant. In the boilover test, an organic solvent is burned on a layer of water in a burning pan to determine the magnitude of the burning caused by the sudden boiling of the water under the solvent. The optimum conditions for boilover burning are determined by the relationship between the pan size and the ventilation rate. In the deflagration tests, to investigate the mitigating effects of the cell and duct structures in the ventilation system, rocket fuel is burned in the test cell to generate a transient gas overload. A decrease is observed in the pressure, temperature, and flow rate peaks of the gas in the facility. To confirm the integrity of the blower and the durability of the ventilation system motor, a blower test is performed. Pressurized air accumulated in a tank is forced into the blower, and the response of the blower is measured.