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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Sellafield awards $3.86B in infrastructure contracts to three companies
Sellafield Ltd., the site license company overseeing the decommissioning of the U.K.’s Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, England, announced the award of £2.9 billion (about $3.86 billion) in infrastructure support contracts to the companies of Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, Costain, and HOCHTIEF (UK) Construction.
Eric N. Brown, Dan L. Borovina
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | December 2021 | Pages S204-S221
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1913954
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper is set during the 1944 and 1945 final push to complete Project Y—the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos—and focuses primarily on overcoming the challenge of creating and demonstrating a successful convergent explosive implosion to turn a subcritical quantity of plutonium into a critical mass. The critical mass would then efficiently yield kilotons of trinitrotoluene (TNT)-equivalent energy in about a microsecond, demonstrating the implosion atomic bomb concept. This work culminated in the Trinity atomic test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. This implosion effect demarcated the approach to explosive science and technology that the Los Alamos National Laboratory has followed ever since, including development of high-explosive synthesis and formulation, small and large test and diagnostic facilities, shock dynamics theory, high-explosive system design engineering, and three-dimensional implosion modeling and simulation using some of the fastest computers in the world. This work also ushered in new generations of interdisciplinary scientists contributing to the field of explosives and a period of broader application of precision high explosives in conventional munitions, demolition, mining and oil exploration, and space travel.