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BWXT’s Centrifuge Manufacturing Development Facility opens in Oak Ridge
BWX Technologies announced on January 26 that it has begun operating its Centrifuge Manufacturing Development Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., with the purpose of reestablishing a domestic uranium enrichment capability to meet U.S. national security needs. The facility is part of a program funded by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to supply enriched uranium for defense needs.
Ilyas Yilgor, Eymon Lan, Shanbin Shi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 753-770
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2087835
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Interest in heat pipe microreactors (HPMRs) has recently grown due to several unique advantages compared with other reactor types. These compact and mobile reactors are expected to find applications in a variety of fields to provide carbon-free power in remote or off-grid locations. Experimental work is needed to aid and expedite the design and licensing of future HPMRs, especially on the validation of heat pipe performance as key heat transfer components. A Low-Temperature Heat Pipe Test Facility (LTHPF) was designed and constructed according to previously developed scaling laws to bypass the difficulties of experimenting with liquid-metal working fluids by using surrogate fluids. The design, instrumentation, and experimental capabilities of the facility are described. The testing conditions, including various operating limits and the ranges of the nondimensional parameters used for scaling analysis, are reported. It is found that certain nondimensional parameters could yield a wide range over the operating conditions, whereas some showed minimal variation when water was used as the working fluid. Last, the performance of several types of wicks, including the annulus-screen, groove-screen, and wrapped-screen designs, were investigated for applications in the LTHPF. It is observed that the groove-screen wick structure provided slight improvement in capillary limits at higher temperatures and that the wrapped-screen wick yielded lower capillary limits due to the absence of a low-resistance flow path for the liquid.