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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.
Walter Seifritz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | November 1983 | Pages 286-294
Technical Paper | Economic | doi.org/10.13182/NT83-A33288
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A nuclear reactor strategy that involves light water reactors (LWRs) and advanced pressurized water reactors (APWRs) with a high conversion ratio was analyzed in a logistical manner assuming a finite resource of ∼5 million metric tons of natural uranium. The emphasis lies in the treatment of the dynamics of deploying this two-component LWR-APWR system. The result is that the improvement of the uranium utilization is a function of time and reaches its maximum value (a factor of ∼3 compared with the classical plutonium recycling) only at the very end of the cheap natural uranium era. In view of the future role of nuclear energy in covering a substantial part of the global energy demand, it is shown that an LWR-APWR reactor strategy could neither reach an acceptable power level nor would it be able to support such a level over a significant period of time. If we want to raise the nuclear capacity to a reasonable level, the early introduction of the fast breeder reactor is unavoidable.