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August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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. Frewer, W. Keller, R. Pruschek
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 90 | Number 4 | August 1985 | Pages 411-426
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE85-4
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The modular high-temperature reactor (HTR-M) is characterized by the use of standardized reactor, heat transfer, and loop components. One or more primary circuit units make up the nuclear steam-generating system (or heat-generating system) of a HTR-M power plant. The core of the helium-cooled HTR-M consists of a randomly packed bed of spherical fuel elements (pebble bed reactor). The characteristic design of the HTR-M core ensures that permissible core temperatures are not exceeded, even if all cooling systems fail. Today, HTR-M power plants can already be applied in the combined generation of electricity, process steam, and/or district heat. In the near future the HTR-M can be used as a heat source for processing plants in the chemical industry, e.g., for methane cracking, coal gasification and similar chemical processes.