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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.
R. D. McKnight
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 75 | Number 1 | July 1980 | Pages 111-125
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE80-A20322
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A detailed validation study of the SDX fast reactor cell homogenization code, Benoist anisotropic diffusion coefficients, and an associated three-dimensional to one-dimensional unit cell modeling procedure has been in progress. These earlier results have investigated the standard zero power reactor (ZPR) plate-type unit cell The present study represents a complimentary validation effort for the ZPR pin calandria-type unit cell. The unit cell loading selected for this work consisted of a 5.08- × 5.08- × 30.48-cm voided calandria loaded with a 4 × 4 array of 0.957-cm (diam) × 15.24-cm mixed-oxide rods (15% PuO2/UO2). This unit cell was used in the pin zone measurements of the ZPR gas-cooled fast reactor program and also in the sodium-voided pin zone measurements of ZPR-6 Assembly 7. The validation effort consists of direct comparison with results of VIM (continuous energy Monte Carlo) calculations. The SDX/Gelbard methods have been shown to adequately predict both nonleakage and leakage effects for the voided pin calandria unit cell.