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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.
Kevin Hesketh, Gerhard Schlosser, Dieter F. Porsch, Timm Wolf, Oliver Köberl, Benoit Lance, Rakesh Chawla, Jess C. Gehin, Ron Ellis, Sadao Uchikawa, Osamu Sato, Tsutomu Okubo, Hideaki Mineo, Toru Yamamoto, Yutaka Sagayama, Enrico Sartori
Nuclear Technology | Volume 148 | Number 3 | December 2004 | Pages 244-258
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3564
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For many years various countries with access to commercial reprocessing services have been routinely recycling plutonium as UO2/PuO2 mixed oxide (MOX) fuel in light water reactors (LWRs). This LWR MOX recycle strategy is still widely regarded as an interim step leading to the eventual establishment of sustainable fast reactor fuel cycles. The OECD/NEA Working Party on the Physics of Plutonium Fuels and Innovative Fuel Cycles (WPPR) has recently completed a review of the technical options for plutonium management in what it refers to as the "medium term." For the purpose of the review, the WPPR considers the medium term to cover the period from now up to the point at which fast reactor fuel cycles are established on a commercial scale. The review identified a number of different designs of innovative plutonium fuel assemblies intended to be used in current LWR cores, in LWRs with significantly different moderation properties, as well as in high-temperature gas reactors. The full review report describes these various options and highlights their respective advantages and disadvantages. This paper briefly summarizes the main findings of the review.