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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.
Thomas M. Evans, Kevin T. Clarno, Jim E. Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 3 | July 2010 | Pages 292-304
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have developed a modification of the two-grid upscatter acceleration scheme of Adams and Morel. The modified scheme uses a low-angular-order discrete ordinates equation to accelerate Gauss-Seidel multigroup iteration. This modification ensures that the scheme does not suffer from consistency problems that can affect diffusion-accelerated methods in multidimensional, multimaterial problems. The new transport two-grid scheme is very simple to implement for different spatial discretizations because it uses the same transport operator. The scheme has also been demonstrated to be very effective on three-dimensional, multimaterial problems. On simple one-dimensional graphite and heavy-water slabs modeled in three dimensions with reflecting boundary conditions, we see reductions in the number of Gauss-Seidel iterations by factors of 75 to 1000. We have also demonstrated the effectiveness of the new method on neutron well-logging problems. For forward problems, the new acceleration scheme reduces the number of Gauss-Seidel iterations by more than an order of magnitude with a corresponding reduction in the run time. For adjoint problems, the speedup is not as dramatic, but the new method still reduces the run time by greater than a factor of 6.