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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.
A. J. Buslik
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 32 | Number 2 | May 1968 | Pages 233-240
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A19735
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Few-group diffusion equations are derived from variational principles. It is shown that by proper choice of trial function it is possible to derive a few-group theory in which interface boundary conditions of continuity of few-group fluxes and currents are obtained, even when the few-group constants are obtained by flux-adjoint weighting. The analysis is facilitated by the use of functionals that incorporate the interface condition of flux continuity by means of Lagrange multipliers. Two functionals are used to give two variants of the theory. Both functionals have as Euler equations the P-1 approximation to the time-independent, eigenvalue form of the energy-dependent transport equation. In addition, the current and flux interface boundary conditions are part of the complement of Euler conditions of the functionals. The functionals admit trial functions discontinuous in space and energy. The two functionals differ in that one has both flux and current arguments, whereas the other has only flux arguments, and yields the P-1 equations in second-order diffusion form.