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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.
John T. Mihalczo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 3 | March 1967 | Pages 557-563
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A17621
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method is described for predicting the neutron multiplication factors of geometrically complicated configurations of unreflected unmoderated enriched- uranium metal from the results of two delayed-critical experiments in simple geometry. The method requires two constants characteristic of the metal. These are the total collision cross section (∑t) and the number of neutrons produced per collision (υ∑f/∑t), which are obtained from the two experiments by using S12 transport-theory calculations with isotropic scattering. These constants, together with the assumption of isotropic scattering, are then used in 05R Monte Carlo neutron-transport calculations to predict the multiplication factors. The method has been tested by predicting the multiplication factors of 21 different delayed-critical assemblies with a wide variety of geometries to within a standard deviation of 1.5%.