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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.
Chaung Lin, Shyurng-Rern Chang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 107 | Number 2 | February 1991 | Pages 158-172
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE91-A15729
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An adaptive predictive control system (APCS) is applied to the design of the recirculation and feedwater control systems of a boiling water reactor. The APCS uses the dead zone method to modify the adaptive law; thus, it is stable in the presence of unmodeled dynamics and bounded disturbances. Two single-input/single-output control systems are used instead of a multi-input/multi-output control system in order to simplify parameter adaptation. The interactions among the subsystems are treated as unmeasured disturbances. A simulation using the reactor model shows that the dome pressure versus recirculation pump speed subsystem is a nonminimum-phase system. To handle this system, the weighting polynomials for the system input and output are incorporated to form an augmented minimum-phase system and then the augmented system is controlled. The proposed algorithm is stable, does not require persistent excitation of the reference input, and performs well, which makes it practical for implementation.