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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.
Joseph A. Christensen, R. A. Borrelli
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 11 | November 2022 | Pages 1333-1348
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2087832
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work uses evaluated criticality safety benchmarks to examine the effect of heterogeneity in high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) systems. A subset of benchmarks selected based on their composition parameters is slightly modified to artificially introduce heterogeneity, and the difference in the effective multiplication factor between the homogeneous benchmark and the modified model is determined. The difference in the multiplication factor is evaluated for correlations against both the moderator ratio and the enrichment of the benchmarks, and the correlations are examined using established statistical methods. In several cases, statistically significant correlations are observed and discussed, and the lack of expected correlations is also discussed.