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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.
Kaushik Banerjee, William R. Martin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 170 | Number 3 | March 2012 | Pages 234-250
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The kernel density estimator (KDE) is used to represent Monte Carlo tallies. Two new neutron flux estimators and their variances are developed, namely the KDE collision and KDE track-length tallies. These new estimators are capable of estimating the flux and its variance at any point within a given domain without any bin structure. The strength of these two estimators is illustrated with numerical examples in one- and two-dimensional geometries. Convergence properties of the KDE estimators are discussed and the KDE estimators are compared with the functional expansion tally (FET) and the conventional histogram tally. The results show that the KDE tallies compare favorably with the FET and histogram tallies with respect to accuracy and convergence rate. Disadvantages of KDE estimators are also discussed, and some future research scopes in this area are identified.