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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
E. H. Lundgren, A. C. Forsman, M. L. Hoppe, K. A. Moreno, A. Nikroo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 51 | Number 4 | May 2007 | Pages 576-580
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST51-756
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have successfully fabricated 2 mm beryllium targets pressurized with a gas mixture of ~20 atm deuterium and ~0.1 atm argon. These targets have been used for indirect drive Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) experiments on the Z-pinch machine at Sandia National Laboratories leading to record neutron yields of ~3.5 × 1011 [J.E. Bailey, et al., "Be Capsule Implosions Driven by Dynamic Hohlraum X-rays," Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. 51, 107 (2006)]. This paper will discuss the process of fabricating such targets from intact shells (Be sputter coated CH mandrels). These processes include laser drilling a ~6 m diameter fill hole in a shell, removing the CH mandrel by pyrolysis, pressurizing the target with a deuterium/argon gas mixture and sealing the fill hole using UV glue while under pressure. The targets were characterized for gas pressure and deuterium gas permeation half-life by utilizing techniques including mass spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and controlled shell bursting.