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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.
Ely M. Gelbard, Raymond P. Hughes
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 70 | Number 3 | June 1979 | Pages 262-273
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A20147
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In earlier work by Gelbard and Lell, arguments based on perturbation theory were used to obtain relations between mean-square chord lengths and lattice eigenvalues for given bucklings. We show here that first-order perturbation theory does not give the lattice eigenvalue correctly to order B2. When all missing terms in B2 are inserted, the eigenvalue buckling relations remain formally unchanged, but the mean-square chord lengths must be redefined. The original and redefined mean-square chord lengths differ only insofar as events in successive fission generations are correlated. A reexamination of work based on the original relations indicates that earlier numerical results were substantially correct.