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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.
Cory D. Ahrens
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 170 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 98-101
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-69TN
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since the introduction of the angular segmentation or Sn method some 60 years ago, there have been many advances in the understanding of the method and many improvements to it. Indeed, the Sn method is now a widely used technique for deterministic solution of the transport equation. For three-dimensional (3-D) calculations, the method relies on numerical quadratures for the sphere, which integrate certain subspaces of spherical harmonics. The construction of such quadratures can be difficult. Here we report the development of new, highly efficient quadratures for the sphere that are invariant under the icosahedral rotation group. We compare the efficiency of the standard level-symmetric quadratures commonly used for 3-D Sn calculations and see that the new quadratures can be as much as 70% more efficient than the standard quadratures.