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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.
T. D. Radcliff, J. R. Parsons, W. S. Johnson, A. E. Ruggles
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 131 | Number 3 | March 1999 | Pages 426-438
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2044
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An existing geometric and fluid-fluid scaled facility is applied to investigate the transport of borated safety injection (SI) fluid in the Westinghouse AP600 reactor vessel during a main steam-line rupture (MSLR) event. The AP600 reactor has coaxial injection into the vessel downcomer rather than the cold-leg cross-flow injection typical of operating power reactors. This gas-flow test facility has unique detail in the representation of the SI nozzle-to-core inlet path most important to SI transport. Analysis of the transport phenomena expected in the reactor and the scaled facility, given MSLR conditions, indicates that both buoyancy and turbulent diffusion can have comparable influences on SI transport. It is shown that different reactor-to-experiment velocity ratios are required to scale each phenomenon. Tests are performed to evaluate transient SI fluid concentration at the core inlet using the appropriate velocity ratios to scale buoyancy and diffusion. Two asymmetric loop-flow boundary conditions representative of the MSLR event as well as a symmetric flow condition are applied. While no one test result is fully similar to the expected reactor transport, this ensemble of tests provides data that are valuable for AP600 numerical model benchmarking.