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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.
Donald C. Coonfield, Grover Tuck, Harold E. Clark, Bruce B. Ernst
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 39 | Number 3 | March 1970 | Pages 320-328
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE70-A19993
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Critical masses have been determined by experiment and by calculation for enriched-uranium-metal spherical shells moderated internally with a sphere of mild steel of radius 8.01 cm. The shells were reflected with various thicknesses of mild steel followed by an effectively infinite amount of oil. The points representing critical mass as a function of the thickness of the steel reflector are not related by a smooth curve. The irregularity appears to be most severe for a 3-cm-thick steel reflector and is due to the resonance in the neutron elastic-scattering cross section of iron.