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.
Masaharu Kitamura, Kunihiko Matsubara, Ritsuo Oguma
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 70 | Number 1 | April 1979 | Pages 106-110
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A18934
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The feasibility of reactor noise analysis by autoregressive (AR) modeling is studied from the viewpoint of system identifiability. A condition is derived in which only a part of the identified model becomes meaningful. A practical checking method termed “RRV checking” is proposed, with which the occurrence of the condition is recognized a posteriori for the estimated AR model. This method is applied to AR models obtained by processing the experimental data from the Japan Power Demonstration Reactor II. These models would have been discarded from a conventional viewpoint, since some parts of the model showed physically implausible characteristics. It is verified that the RR V checking method and the empirical evaluation of the usability of the model resulted in the same conclusion about the acceptability of the parts of the models. The processes evaluated to be identifiable from the reactor noise are the response of the fuel temperature to the neutron density and the response of the steam control valve to the reactor pressure. The present method is particularly useful if a priori knowledge about the dynamics of the objective process is limited before the identification experiment.