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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.
W. Ciechanowicz, K. O. Solberg
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 36 | Number 3 | June 1969 | Pages 361-371
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A18734
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The scope of the paper was to theoretically check the compromise in the control-strategy design to decrease the required number of computations. Two types of HBWR control system models have been investigated: one involves the control-strategy calculation for the overall dynamic system; in the other case, the overall system has been split into two systems characterized by smaller number of state variables. The interactions between the split systems have been included by use of crosscoupling controller elements. The comparison between considered control models has shown similar dynamic behavior of the investigated state variables. The main advantage of splitting the system is decreasing the order of state vectors taken into account in the control-strategy calculations. The constraint problem has been considered by making use of Lagrange multiplier formalism and when the physical amplitude limitations are imposed on the controller signals. The comparison of both types of constraints has shown that the latter is quite satisfactory simplification in the constraint problem of the controller signals. The advantage of applying the physical limitation of the controller signal amplitude is that this type of constraint does not require the computer memory capacity for storage of the optimum trajectory space.