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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
Cyra Neugebauer, Y. Hörstensmeyer, C. Day
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 215-220
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1704139
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the main design drivers of the EU-DEMO fuel cycle is to avoid unnecessary hydrogen isotope separation. In the tritium plant, this implies a novel functionality for isotope rebalancing (IR) and protium removal (PR). The task of IR is to adjust the deuterium-tritium ratio by several percent gradually over time in order to establish the required fuel mixture composition before reinjection into the torus. The PR is needed to process and separate protium, which inevitably enters the system via outgassing or replacement reactions. The candidate technology for the IR/PR function is temperature swing absorption, which is based on anticyclical operation of two absorption columns with reversed isotope effects. In order to characterize the separation process, a new test rig has been designed and is currently being assembled. This paper describes the principle idea of the process, develops a model to predict the performance, and presents simulation results for a DEMO-relevant gas composition. Palladium and vanadium have been selected for the modeling. It is shown that at the end of one column tritium could be separated with 92.5% purity. At the other column, protium with 46.4% and deuterium with 44.8% purity could be removed. A subsequent parameter study showed that the ideal gas supply would be 40% of the total length of the column and that 22 was the optimal number of cycles before extraction.