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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.
E. M. O blow, F. G. Pin, R. Q. Wright
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 94 | Number 1 | September 1986 | Pages 46-65
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A17116
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An automated procedure for performing large-scale sensitivity studies based on the use of computer calculus is presented. The procedure is embodied in a FORTRAN precompiler called GRESS, which automatically processes computer models adding derivative-taking capabilities to the normal calculated results. The theory and applicability of the GRESS code are described and tested against a major geohydrological modeling problem. The SWENT nuclear waste repository modeling code is used as the basis for these studies. Results for a test problem involving groundwater flow in the vicinity of the Richton Salt Dome are discussed in detail. Sensitivity results are compared with analytical, perturbation, and alternate sensitivity approaches to the problem. Five-place accuracy in these sensitivity results is verified for all cases in which the effects of nonlinearities are made sufficiently small. Conclusions are drawn as to the applicability of GRESS in the problem studied and for more general large-scale modeling sensitivity studies.