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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.
Daniel T. Willcox, James R. Parry
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 10 | October 2019 | Pages 1302-1311
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1590075
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test Facility has been restarted after more than 20 years in a safe standby condition. The plan to bring the reactor back into operation included a typical core characterization that was historically performed every time the core was reconfigured for a new experiment campaign. The core characterization included determining initial critical position of the control rods, a heat balance run for calibration of the nuclear instruments to enable the indication of reactor power, control rod worth measurements, and a series of three temperature-limited transients increasing in the amount of reactivity inserted as a step for the interpolation of set points for the reactor trip system and reactivity insertion limits. The heat balance and control rod worth measurements are discussed in this paper. After critical control rod position was determined, a heat balance operation was used to position the nuclear instruments for correct power indication. This was followed by control rod differential worth measurements to generate the control rod worth curves used by the automatic reactor control system for control of the reactor during transient operations. These restart evolutions are summarized here, and the results are compared to the historic measurements.