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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.
Raymond C. Wang, Yunlin Xu, Nathanael Hudson, Thomas J. Downar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 183 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 504-514
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A19437
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Special Power Excursion Reactor Test III (SPERT III) was a series of reactivity insertion experiments conducted in the 1950s. This paper describes the validation of the U.S. NRC coupled code system TRITON/PARCS/TRACE to simulate reactivity insertion accidents (RIA) using several of the SPERT III tests. The NRC coupled code system was used to perform the SPERT III E-Core configuration tests in which the RIA was initiated by the rapid ejection of a central cruciform control rod. The resulting superprompt reactivity excursion and negative Doppler reactivity feedback produced the familiar bell-shaped power increase and decrease. The energy deposition during such a power excursion has important safety consequences, and the SPERT III tests provide a validation basis for the NRC coupled multiphysics codes. The models were developed using the original experiment documentation, and the results of five separate tests were used to validate the TRITON/PARCS/TRACE coupled code system.