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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.
Sümer Şahin, Jacques Ligou
Nuclear Technology | Volume 50 | Number 1 | August 1980 | Pages 88-94
Technical Paper | Nuclear Explosive | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A17072
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Assuming the spontaneous fission neutron level as a neutron source, and using point kinetic methods in the course of the analytical treatment, the energy excursion of hypothetical nuclear explosives with mixed plutonium of various isotope compositions has been investigated. The α-Rossi values for the metallic density of different configurations have been evaluated with multigroup SN methods. Commercial plutonium from relatively low burned-up nuclear fuel, containing 5% 240Pu, is shown to reveal similarities with high weapons-grade plutonium, thus making possible a nuclear explosion (in combination with a sophisticated conventional implosion technique). On the other hand, commercial plutonium from moderately to highly burned up (containing 15 or 25% 240Pu nuclear fuel) will have a small probability for an energy excursion up to 100 tons TNT, even by extremely improved implosion techniques.