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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.
J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr. Keshav N. Srivastava
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 82 | Number 3 | December 1982 | Pages 316-324
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE82-A19392
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We prove two mathematically rigorous theorems that assert, under certain carefully stated hypotheses, the validity of the Goertzel and Otsuka conclusions that, in a thermal nuclear reactor that has a minimum critical mass, the fuel must be distributed so that the product of the thermal neutron flux and the adjoint thermal neutron flux is a constant in the core and does not exceed that constant in the reflector. These theorems differ from that in the preceding paper in the sense that some of the hypotheses of the earlier theorem have been strengthened and some weakened. The hypotheses can be weakened still further if we restrict attention to a fixed core and are not interested in results concerning the reflector. We also study the second variation of the critical mass functional. Finally, we show that, under some explicitly stated conditions, the multigroup diffusion theory for a thermal reactor can be treated as a special case of our general theory.