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Conference Spotlight
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.
Joseph Cochran, Subhash C. Sarin, Nathan Lau, (Virginia Tech)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1672-1690
A Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) outage is a planned period of time during which the plant does not produce energy and undergoes offline refueling and maintenance. For a commercial power plant, an outage window could last up to two months during which thousands of activities are performed. These activities are related by precedence thereby constituting an activity network. A team of planners/schedulers develops an outage schedule at least a year in advance of the execution of an outage. A significant loss of revenue incurs for every extra outage day beyond the planned period. The four scheduling problems that are typically faced in outage scheduling and planning include: (1) selection of outage window for a collection of NPPs, (2) generation of a feasible initial outage schedule, (3) updating the outage schedule when unplanned activities arise, and (4) measuring the risk of a given outage schedule. In this paper, we present approaches for each of these problems as well as highlight the areas for potential future research. Outage activity networks with both deterministic and stochastic durations are considered.