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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.
A. I. Shestakov, D. S. Kershaw, G. B. Zimmerman
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 105 | Number 1 | May 1990 | Pages 88-104
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE90-A19215
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several test problems are presented for evaluating the radiation diffusion equations. For spatial transport schemes, one-dimensional problems with known analytic solutions are tested on two-dimensional domains with nonorthogonal meshes. It is shown that a scheme based on the finite element method is insensitive to grid distortions when the diffusion term is dominant. Other test problems deal with Compton scattering, specifically the one-dimensional Fokker-Planck equation coupled to an equation describing the change in electron temperature. The test problems model the evolution of a Planckian radiation field as it equilibrates with the electrons. In all cases, the numerical results are compared with the analytic ones.