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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.
Sanjeev Kumar Sharma, Manoj Kansal, N. Mohan, P. K. Malhotra, S. G. Ghadge
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 2 | October 2011 | Pages 222-227
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-16
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the important issues in severe reactor accident scenarios is the containment integrity and the characteristics of the source term that governs the ultimate radioactive releases to the environment. The releases are in the form of aerosols that are generated by the condensation of volatile fission products released from fuel, within the containment, during the severe accident. A loss-of-coolant accident with simultaneous failure of the emergency core cooling system has been postulated for a study of such aerosols. For the aerosol behavior in the containment, various removal mechanisms, such as gravitational settling, diffusional plate-out, and diffusiophoresis, and growth processes such as agglomerations and condensation have been included. The transport process such as leakage from the containment has also been modeled. This paper discusses the results of the studies carried out to estimate aerosols' behavior in the Tarapor Atomic Power Station (TAPS)-3&4 containment following their release during the postulated accident condition. It was found that the gravitational settling is the major aerosol removal mechanism following the postulated severe accident.