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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.
Andrew G. Benson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 6 | June 2022 | Pages 947-989
Technical Paper – Special section on the Nuclear, Humanities, and Social Science Nexus | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1991762
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lead time—the duration of construction and commissioning—is an important determinant of the capital cost of nuclear power plants (NPPs). For an industry dominated by a handful of multinational firms, the degree of cross-national variation is surprising. NPP lead times have historically trended upward over time in Western nations, and yet they are comparatively quick and stable in East Asia. I theorize that the institutional capacity and autonomy of subnational governments can partially explain these patterns in the data. Having assembled a novel data set on the design specifications of the global population of NPPs, I empirically document a positive association between political decentralization and NPP lead time that is not explained by observed cross-country differences in NPP design. The results are suggestive of the hypothesis that political decentralization creates conditions that slow NPP construction for nontechnical reasons. However, the findings are not robust to certain robustness checks and fail to rule out the possibility that unobserved differences in design explain this association.