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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.
David W. Kraft, Robert G. Butler
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 475-481
Other Concepts and Assessments | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13466
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We consider a dense gas of deuterium to undergo a rapid, adiabatic compression by a piston in a chamber. A reduction in the degrees of freedom of the plasma particles, such as may be effected by an electric discharge during the compression or by the application of magnetic fields, results in a higher final temperature for a given compression ratio. In model calculations we consider the adiabatic compression of one mole of molecular deuterium modeled as a van der Waals gas initially at room temperature and we compare the subsequent fusion energy release with the work done by the piston for various values of compression ratio and degrees of freedom. Prior work considered fusion to occur only at the end of the compression while the present work considers fusion energy released at various stages during the compression. Higher final temperatures and ratios of output to input energy result from this refinement of the model.