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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.
H. W. Lewis
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 86 | Number 1 | January 1984 | Pages 111-112
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE84-A17975
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A very simple application of the canonical Bayesian algorithm is made to the problem of estimation of the probability of core melt in a commercial power reactor. An approximation to the results of the Rasmussen study on reactor safety is used as the prior distribution, and the observation that there has been no core melt yet is used as the single experiment. The result is a substantial decrease in the mean probability of core melt—factors of 2 to 4 for reasonable choices of parameters. The purpose is to illustrate the procedure, not to argue for the decrease.