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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.
Rubin Goldstein, Louis M. Shotkin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 38 | Number 2 | November 1969 | Pages 94-103
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19513
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
By means of approximate numerical solutions obtained from a first-order correction to the prompt-jump approximation, good agreement is found with exact numerical solutions of the kinetics equations. Accuracies of <0.1% are obtainable for iterative time steps of as much as 1 sec, provided the reactor remains below prompt-critical [i.e., k(t) < $1]. The accuracy increases as l/β → 0, i.e., as the prompt-neutron lifetime becomes smaller or as the reactor becomes “faster.” This is true for both fast- and slow-reactivity insertion rates, C. Two methods for handling rapid reactivity insertion rates are discussed. One (Method A) is more applicable for C ≈ 1 → 50 $/sec, and the other (Method B, which effectively shifts the time scale) is more applicable for C ≳ 50 $/sec. In the one delayed-neutron-group approximation, analytic results are presented for arbitrary reactivity insertion rates and comparisons are made with previous methods.