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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.
C. Kalbach
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 95 | Number 1 | January 1987 | Pages 70-78
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE87-A20433
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Improvements have been made to an existing method for implementing realistic pairing corrections in particle-hole state densities. The threshold energy for the pairing “single particle” states is used to replace the usual equispacing model Pauli energy, resulting in an improvement in the calculated state densities for low exciton numbers. Remaining discrepancies between the simple state densities and the results of a detailed pairing calculation are attributable to deficiencies in the original equispacing model state density formula. An ad hoc improvment to this formula is proposed. The method is extended to state densities for two types of fermions, and questions associated with its practical implementation are discussed.