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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
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.
Braden Goddard, William Charlton, Paolo Peerani
Nuclear Technology | Volume 186 | Number 3 | June 2014 | Pages 403-414
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-18
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As new reprocessing techniques and fuel forms are developed, the ability of inspection agencies and facility operators to measure powders containing several actinides becomes increasingly necessary. Neutrons emitted from induced and spontaneous fission of different nuclides are very similar, making it difficult to measure these powders with nondestructive assay techniques. To measure the powders, a neutron multiplicity technique based on first-principle methods was developed to exploit isotope-specific nuclear properties, such as energy-dependent fission cross sections and neutron-induced fission multiplicity. This technique was tested through measurements using an epithermal neutron multiplicity counter with two different interrogation (α,n) sources and varying plutonium materials. To complement these measurements, extensive Monte Carlo N-Particle eXtended (MCNPX) simulations were performed for each measured sample, as well as samples that were not available to measure. The primary application of this first-principle technique is the measurement of materials containing uranium, neptunium, plutonium, and americium. This technique still has several challenges that need to be overcome, the largest of these being the ability to produce results with acceptably small uncertainties.