ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2026
Nuclear Technology
July 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Burt A. Zolotar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 31 | Number 2 | February 1968 | Pages 282-294
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A18240
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The one-mode stochastic nuclear reactor model has been proposed by Bell to study fluctuations in neutron populations. The purpose of this model is to allow consistent space and energy corrections to point reactor stochastic results. The model has been extended to also cover fluctuations in captures and fissions. A time-dependent, Monte Carlo computer program has been developed to simulate these fluctuations for a one-velocity bare reactor system and to estimate parameters of the probability distributions. It has been shown that the one-mode model for neutron populations and captures gives excellent agreement with the Monte Carlo results. Both showed a correction of about 50% to the magnitude of the variance predicted by basic point reactor equations. The fission probabilities required a more careful examination, but the Monte Carlo results could be predicted by approximate solutions to the exact stochastic equations. The influence of spatial effects on the properties of persisting and nonpersisting chains in supercritical systems has also been examined. The one-mode model provides important corrections.