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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.
Xiao Gang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 1 | September 2011 | Pages 56-67
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-14
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To obtain the probability distribution of the burst waiting time of neutron initiation in a multiplying assembly, a method that simulates the neutrons that induce a persistent fission chain is introduced in this paper. By this simulation method, neutron initiation experiments performed on Godiva-II and CFBR-II at a reactivity above prompt critical and performed on Godiva-I at a reactivity above delayed critical are studied. The probability density function of the burst waiting time of these experiments is calculated, and the results agree well with those of the experiments. Based on this simulation algorithm, the strength of the delayed neutron source changing with time is also calculated, which helps in the understanding of these neutron initiation experiments conducted on the pulse reactor.