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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.
M. M. R. Williams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 94 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 251-263
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A17268
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neutron flux has been studied around absorbing bodies of spheroidal, bispherical, and toroidal shapes in an infinite nonabsorbing medium. Exact solutions have been obtained by using effective boundary conditions at the surfaces of the absorbing bodies. The problems considered are as follows: 1. Neutron flux and current distributions around prolate and oblate spheroids. It is shown that an equivalent sphere approximation can lead to accurate values for the rate of absorption. 2. Neutron flux and current in a bispherical system of unequal spheres. Three separate situations arise here: (a) two absorbing spheres, (b) two spherical sources, and (c) one spherical source and one absorbing sphere. It is shown how the absorption rate in the two spheres depends on their separation. 3. Neutron flux and current in a toroidal system: (a) an absorbing toroid and (b) a toroidal source. The latter case simulates the flux distribution from a thermonuclear reactor vessel. Finally, a brief description of how these techniques can be extended to multiregion problems is given.