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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.
A. Ziya Akcasu, Larry D. Noble
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 25 | Number 1 | May 1966 | Pages 47-57
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A17500
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Solutions of the point kinetic equations with delayed neutrons for reactor systems with arbitrary linear feedback are investigated. It is found that the solutions that are Laplace transformable are bounded for all initial perturbations regardless of whether or not the system is linearly stable, provided the Laplace transform of the feedback kernel has no zeros on the positive real axis. This criterion is applied to some reactor models previously investigated by others. It is shown that there are also nontransformable solutions that possess a finite escape time and that such solutions can exist only if the reactor has a prompt positive reactivity coefficient. The asymptotic behavior of these solutions near the escape time is also obtained. These general conclusions are verified by considering some specific feedback models for which exact solutions are available. Numerical solutions for reactor systems with more realistic feedback models, such as one used to describe EBR-I, are obtained by a digital computer.