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The deadline arrives: Checking in on the Reactor Pilot Program
On May 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the DOE,” which instructed the Department of Energy to create a Reactor Pilot Program (RPP)—a new system in which companies could pursue DOE authorization to build and test their first-of-a-kind nuclear technologies. EO 14301 set an ambitious goal for that program: three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.
C. R. Gould, A. I. Hawari, E. I. Sharapov
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 2 | June 2010 | Pages 200-209
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-48
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We revisit the determination by Bowman et al. of unusual neutron transport characteristics for a newly fabricated form of graphite [Nucl. Sci. Eng., 159, 182 (2008); Nucl. Sci. Eng., 161, 68 (2009)]. From MCNP modeling and consideration of data from other experiments, we determine revised values for the neutron transport parameters of this graphite. Our reanalysis gives a coherent scattering cross section coh ˜ 4 b at 50 meV, a small-angle neutron scattering cross section sans ˜ 11 to 13 b at 1 meV, and an effective capture cross section a = 5.8 ± 0.5 mb. Scaled to a graphite reference density of 1.60 g/cm3 , we find a diffusion coefficient [overbar D] = 0.94 ± 0.03 cm and a diffusion length L = 47.7 ± 3.7 cm. Apart from the somewhat larger values of a and [overbar D], these are not untypical parameters for graphite. Based on our investigation, the recent experiments and analysis of Bowman et al. do not give evidence for different transport properties for this newly fabricated graphite.