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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.
H. Park, D. A. Knoll, C. K. Newman
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 172 | Number 1 | September 2012 | Pages 52-65
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-81
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present a nonlinear acceleration algorithm for a transport criticality problem. The algorithm combines the well-known nonlinear diffusion acceleration (NDA) algorithm with a recently developed, Newton-based nonlinear criticality acceleration (NCA) algorithm. The algorithm first employs NDA to reduce the system to scalar flux, then NCA is applied to the resulting drift-diffusion system. We apply a nonlinear elimination technique to eliminate the eigenvalue constraint equation from the Jacobian matrix. Numerical results show that the algorithm can reduce the CPU time by a factor of 30 to 400 compared to traditional power iterations (PIs) combined with standard source iterations and by a factor of 3 to 5 compared to application of NDA combined with inner PIs.