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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. Hemmendinger, C. E. Ragan, Jon M. Wallace
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 70 | Number 3 | June 1979 | Pages 274-280
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A20148
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The specific production of tritium in a 600-mm-diam sphere of 6LiD irradiated by a central source of 14-MeV neutrons has been determined by measuring the tritium radioactivity in samples of 6LiH and 7LiH embedded in the sphere. Results are reported for several samples of each isotope at each of five different radii in the assembly. The entire process of decomposing the LiH samples, transferring the evolved gas into counters, and determining the decay rate was standardized by processing LiH samples irradiated by thermal neutrons, for which the 6Li(n,α) cross section is well known. These experiments provide benchmark measurements for checking calculations of neutron transport and tritium production in 6LiD. Tritium production in each ampule, as calculated using a three-dimensional Monte Carlo code, is in reasonable agreement with the experiment. For 7Li, discrepancies between calculation and experiment seem to be due to errors in the tritium production cross sections.