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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.
D. G. Cacuci, E. Kiefhaber, B. Stehle
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 128 | Number 1 | January 1998 | Pages 17-26
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE98-A1942
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The explicit solution developed by Cacuci for the multigroup neutron diffusion equation at interior corners in two-dimensional two-region domains has been applied to the SNR-300 fast reactor prototype design to obtain the exact behavior of the multigroup fluxes at and around typical corners arising between absorber/fuel and follower/fuel assemblies. The calculations have been performed in hexagonal geometry using four energy groups, and the results clearly show that the multigroup fluxes are finite but not analytical at interior corners. In particular, already the first-order spatial derivatives of the multigroup fluxes become unbounded at the corners between follower and fuel assemblies. These results highlight the need to treat properly the influence of corners, both for the direct calculation and for the reconstruction of pointwise neutron flux and power distributions in heterogeneous reactor cores.