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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.
Walter Hanke
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 72 | Number 2 | November 1979 | Pages 265-272
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19472
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Large-size nuclear power reactors are subjected to dynamic problems that can be formulated using modern control theory. The problem considered here is a power oscillation caused by the presence of a fission product, 135Xe, which is formed when the nuclear fuel undergoes fission. The application of control theory leads to a mixed boundary value problem. The presented method avoids the shooting by changing the direction of integration in the adjoint equations. Taking the steady state as the initial function, the method converges in a great parameter range. The method is formulated in general, but results are shown only for the one-dimensional case.