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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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.
M. Zarei
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 6 | June 2025 | Pages 977-987
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2397622
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Closed-loop control of the reactor-follow-turbine operation is attempted in this work. The reactor power is intended to follow the turbine load demand, whereas the coolant average temperature is to be maintained constant for reasons of design safety. To this effect, a standardized pressurized water reactor model is adopted wherein the reactor external reactivity and the feedwater mass flux are deemed the manipulated control signals. Offline system identification is carried out on the model input/output (I/O) terminals to extract first order plus time delay models thereof. A further relative gain array analysis is conducted to determine the most tightly coupled I/O channels. A proportional integral controller is thereafter designed for each channel, making use of an analytical gain/phase margin tuning mechanism. The results for different output tracking scenarios confirm a feasible and quite satisfactory closed-loop control practice.