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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.
G. Apostolakis, T. L. Chu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 50 | Number 1 | August 1980 | Pages 5-15
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A17065
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The reliability analysis of the engineered safety systems of nuclear power plants requires the calculation of the pointwise and average unavailabilities of redundant systems under periodic test and maintenance. The complexity of the calculations usually requires simulation for realistic results. However, simple analytical expressions showing the significant contributions to the unavailability provide insights concerning the relative importance of the potential failure modes of the systems, such as hardware failures, demand-type failures, human errors, and various types of dependent (common cause) failures. These expressions can be used for a quick calculation of the unavailability as well as the propagation of uncertainties by analytical methods, e.g., the method of moments.