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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. C. Leslie, A. Jonsson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 23 | Number 3 | November 1965 | Pages 272-290
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE23-03-272
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method of calculating first-flight collision probabilities in cluster geometry is developed. The method is analytic and approximate and is comparable in speed to codes now available for annular geometry. The proposed scheme is based on a consideration of the properties of the nonescape probability from a nonuniform body in the limits of high and low macroscopic cross sections, together with an interpolation procedure that allows one to determine the probability itself with sufficient accuracy. When calculated for combinations of different rings of fuel pins in a cluster, the resulting set of nonescape probabilities enables one to proceed to a determination of the probability of going from one ring to another. The coolant and the fuel pins are treated separately. Results of the method are compared with exact calculations on two fuel-element types of current interest. In these cases the form factor, defined as the ratio of maximum to mean flux in the cluster, is in error by at most 2%. The hyperfine structure in each ring (i.e. the ratio of the mean flux in the coolant to the mean flux in the fuel) is calculated with comparable accuracy. A one-group calculation on a 37-rod fuel element takes approximately 5 sec on an IBM-7090, so that the method is certainly usable for multigroup applications.