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DOE contract boosts Centrus’s HALEU goals as Urenco continues LEU expansion
In the latest twist in a long-term, multistep contracting arrangement with the Department of Energy, Centrus Energy has signed a contract to finalize terms of a $900 million DOE task order to expand production capacity for high-assay low-enriched uranium at its American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. The expansion is part of Centrus’s multibillion-dollar capacity expansion that also includes low-enriched uranium.
The new DOE award allows the company to transition its HALEU production cascade to a commercial-scale operation at Piketon. The contract also includes options for as much $170 million in HALEU purchases for DOE missions, for a total contract value of $1.07 billion. Those options are subject to the discretion of DOE.
Jeremy Lloyd Conlin, Stephen J. Tobin, Adrienne M. LaFleur, Jianwei Hu, TaeHoon Lee, Nathan P. Sandoval, Melissa A. Schear
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 3 | November 2011 | Pages 314-328
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-88
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The quantification of the plutonium mass in spent nuclear fuel assemblies is an important measurement for nuclear safeguards practitioners. A program is well underway to develop nondestructive assay instruments that, when combined, will be able to quantify the plutonium content of a spent nuclear fuel assembly. Each instrument will quantify a specific attribute of the spent fuel assembly, e.g., the fissile content. In this paper, we present a Monte Carlo-based method of estimating the mean and distribution of some assembly attributes. An MCNPX model of each instrument has been created, and the response of the instrument was simulated for a range of spent fuel assemblies with discrete parameters (e.g., burnup, initial enrichment, and cooling time). The Monte Carlo-based method interpolates between the modeled results for an instrument to emulate a response for parameters not explicitly modeled. We demonstrate the usefulness of this technique in applying the technique to six different instruments under investigation. The results show that this Monte Carlo-based method can be used to estimate the assembly attributes of a spent fuel assembly based upon the measured response from the instrument.