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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.
Yu Ji, ZeGuang Li, Jun Sun, ErSheng You, MingGang Lang, Lei Shi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 8 | August 2020 | Pages 1155-1170
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1760703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) could be an advanced technology to facilitate a new and excellent rocket engine that would at least double the performance of the best conventional chemical rocket engines. NTP has been under development for several decades and was selected as the leading candidate technique for the manned mission to Mars, as suggested in Design Reference Architecture 5.0. During development, many concepts have been proposed, designed, and tested. Among which, the particle bed reactor (PBR) is the one of highest performance, and its compact and lightweight features make it ideal for space applications. In this paper, the thermal-hydraulic characteristics of a PBR are mainly investigated through two studies. The first study is to evaluate whether the principles derived from the PBR of uniform heat release could be applied in the cases of a nonuniform heating profile. The second study is to analyze the effects of some aspects, including porosity of the hot frit and cold frit, power shift, inlet temperature of the coolant on the internal flow, and heat transfer processes in the PBR of a nonuniform heat release. These findings may provide technical support for the subsequent design and optimization of the PBR.