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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.
Jeremy Lloyd Conlin, Stephen J. Tobin, Adrienne M. LaFleur, Jianwei Hu, TaeHoon Lee, Nathan P. Sandoval, Melissa A. Schear
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 3 | November 2011 | Pages 314-328
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-88
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The quantification of the plutonium mass in spent nuclear fuel assemblies is an important measurement for nuclear safeguards practitioners. A program is well underway to develop nondestructive assay instruments that, when combined, will be able to quantify the plutonium content of a spent nuclear fuel assembly. Each instrument will quantify a specific attribute of the spent fuel assembly, e.g., the fissile content. In this paper, we present a Monte Carlo-based method of estimating the mean and distribution of some assembly attributes. An MCNPX model of each instrument has been created, and the response of the instrument was simulated for a range of spent fuel assemblies with discrete parameters (e.g., burnup, initial enrichment, and cooling time). The Monte Carlo-based method interpolates between the modeled results for an instrument to emulate a response for parameters not explicitly modeled. We demonstrate the usefulness of this technique in applying the technique to six different instruments under investigation. The results show that this Monte Carlo-based method can be used to estimate the assembly attributes of a spent fuel assembly based upon the measured response from the instrument.