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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.
P. K. Sarkar, K. N. Kirthi, A. K. Ganguly
Nuclear Technology | Volume 28 | Number 2 | February 1976 | Pages 270-281
Technical Paper | Technique | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A31568
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The proton recoil technique using plastic scintillators is employed to measure fast-neutron spectra. Associated gamma-ray background is eliminated by using various thicknesses of thin scintillators. The method, based on different ranges of electrons and protons in the detector material, is shown to be useful for measuring neutron spectra over an extended energy region. Four scintillator thicknesses are chosen to cover the neutron energy from 1 to 18 MeV, based on practically 100% transmission of Compton-edge electrons. The pulse-height spectra from different detectors are mixed to give a pulse-height spectrum of the “combined” detector. A general purpose unfolding code is developed to unfold the combined pulse-height spectrum using a combined response matrix that results from the mixing of the calculated (Monte Carlo) response functions for the individual detectors. The neutron spectra of different (α,n) sources and of 252Cf spontaneous fission are measured and compared with published data. The technique developed, although used only for a neutron energy up to 14 MeV, can be applied in practice to higher energies.