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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.
Ho Jin Park, Hyung Jin Shim, Han Gyu Joo, Chang Hyo Kim
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 172 | Number 1 | September 2012 | Pages 66-77
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-22
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of this paper is to present the Monte Carlo (MC) method augmented by the B1 spectrum to generate few-group diffusion theory constants, to assess their qualification in terms of the core depletion analysis, and thus to validate the MC method implemented into the Seoul National University MC code, McCARD, as a few-group diffusion theory constant generator. To do so, two-step core neutronics analyses are conducted for two types of power reactors, pressurized water reactors and very high temperature gas-cooled reactors, by the McCARD/MASTER code system in which McCARD is used as a MC few-group constant generation code and MASTER as a deterministic core analysis code. The two-step calculations for the effective multiplication factors and assembly power distributions of the two types of power reactor cores by McCARD/MASTER are compared with the reference calculations from McCARD, the nuclear design report, or measurements. By showing excellent agreement between McCARD/MASTER and the reference neutronics analyses for the two types of power reactors, it is concluded that the MC method implemented in McCARD can generate few-group diffusion theory constants that are well qualified for high-accuracy two-step core neutronics calculations.