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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.
Takashi Kiguchi, Shigehiro An, Akira Oyama
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 43 | Number 3 | March 1971 | Pages 328-340
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A19979
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The energy modal synthesis method is applied to the computation of the neutron-multiplication factor, the sodium-void coefficient, and the spatial-power distribution of an idealized fast reactor configuration. The method is formulated by means of the variational principle and the error estimator is introduced by the expansion technique of the trial functions in the eigenfunction series. In the space-independent case, the sodium-void coefficient and its error are obtained very accurately by the linear combination of two modes, and the optimal two modes are chosen by the physical consideration. In the one-dimensional case, the continuous-type and the discontinuous-type energy modal synthesis method are formulated. In both cases the infinite-medium spectra and some supplementary modes are used as the trial energy modes. The results of a few-mode synthesis give a good estimate of the reactor parameters, and the error can be evaluated successfully by the error estimator.