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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.
Leo B. Levitt, Jerome Spanier
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 37 | Number 2 | August 1969 | Pages 278-287
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A20688
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo calculations based on the adjoint transport equation offer an attractive alternative to calculations based on the transport equation when the detector region is much smaller than the source region. However, when an analog simulation of the adjoint equation is attempted, extra variance may arise due essentially to the nonphysical aspects of the adjoint equation. In this paper, a new adjoint Monte Carlo technique is described in which most of this additional variance has been eliminated. The method appears to be very useful for solving slowing down problems involving energies below the threshold for inelastic scattering. The basis for the technique is the idea of exactly reversing direct Monte Carlo random walks. It is shown that this reversal may be accomplished via a transformation of the adjoint transport equation by means of a discontinuous importance function. This transformation is a logical extension to continuous energies of an adjoint multigroup formulation used by Gelbard and Spanier to study thermal problems. Numerical results are provided which illustrate the variance reduction resulting from the use of this technique.