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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.
R. T. Evans, D. G. Cacuci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 172 | Number 2 | October 2012 | Pages 216-222
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-110
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have implemented the first-order adjoint sensitivity analysis procedure (ASAP) into the three-dimensional parallel radiation transport code system Denovo, a module of the SCALE software suite. In particular, we used a Krylov-based approach to compute the solution to the inhomogeneous adjoint systems occurring in the ASAP. Our implementation, as a component of Denovo's scalable framework, should allow the efficient computation of cross section and atomic number density sensitivity coefficients for critical systems in a massively parallel fashion. We have constructed a proof that the Krylov-based approach converges to a unique solution and compared its computational requirements with the standard algorithm used in the neutron transport community. In addition, we performed a verification of our ASAP implementation on the Godiva experimental benchmark. We found the new approach to be an order of magnitude faster than the standard algorithm in this benchmark.