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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.
J. H. Lee, Y. H. Kang, S. C. Hwang, J. B. Shim, E. H. Kim, S. W. Park
Nuclear Technology | Volume 162 | Number 2 | May 2008 | Pages 135-143
Technical Paper | First International Pyroprocessing Research Conference | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3940
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The conventional electrorefiners to treat a metallic spent fuel equipped with a steel cathode have a sticking characteristic that hinders their overall processing efficiency. The critical question in order to enhance their throughput is how to decrease the sticking coefficient of the cathode. In order to realize this purpose, the conventional steel cathode was replaced with a graphite one. The graphite cathode exhibited self-scraping behavior in which the electrodeposited uranium dendrite falls from the cathode surface on its own without any kind of mechanical operation such as a scraping and rotation of the electrode. This self-scraping phenomenon of the graphite cathode was interpreted to be due to the formation of a uranium graphite intercalation compound. In this self-scraping mechanism, uranium atoms elongate at the graphite's outermost layer by an intercalation reaction, so the deposited uranium dendrite falls off spontaneously as the gravitational force exceeds the bonding strength of the layers. Based on our preliminary work, a self-scraping should increase the efficiency of an electrorefiner due to the elimination of a mechanical scraping as well as the electrolytic stripping steps of the cathode.