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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.
Timothy D. Welch, August W. Cronenberg
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 67 | Number 2 | August 1978 | Pages 263-269
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A15444
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An important question to the liquid-metal fast breeder reactor safety program is a description of molten fuel dynamics, or, more specifically, whether fuel will freeze locally on structural material within the reactor core, preventing dispersal and nuclear shutdown, or in the extremeties of the fuel assembly. In this Note, a comparison is made between the solidification processes for single-component (i.e., UO2) and mixed-oxide fuel [i.e., (U, Pu)O2] by solving a Stefan-type problem for both pure and binary alloy solidification. Analytic calculations indicate that the freezing rate of the mixed fuel is not significantly different from that for the single-component system; thus, single-front analysis may be used for such mixed-oxide fuels in assessing safety questions associated with solidifacation phenomena.