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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.
Heiner Meldner
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 69 | Number 3 | March 1979 | Pages 438-441
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19963
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) pellet center burnup of fission reactor waste, namely, 14-MeV neutron fission of the very long-lived actinides that pose storage problems, is calculated for realistic target designs. A major advantage of pellet center burnup is safety: Only milligram quantities of highly toxic and active material need to be present in the fusion chamber, whereas blanket burnup reqUires the continued presence of tons of actinides in a small volume. One ICP plant can transmute the actinide waste of up to ten power equivalent fission reactors, i.e., large-scale development appears to provide a foreseeable-future technology that greatly reduces the necessity of high integrity waste storage (burial) time: from 107 to just over 102 yr.