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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.
G. E. Hansen and H. A. Sandmeier
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 22 | Number 3 | July 1965 | Pages 315-320
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A20935
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Adjoint transport theory is most widely used in perturbation theory. A most common problem here is the determination of the reactivity change in a self-multiplying system due to the insertion of an absorber in a small region. There is, however, a class of problems of the source-detector type where adjoint transport theory proves to be a very effective and fast way of obtaining the desired results. In many practical source problems we want to evaluate the reaction rate, say fissions or absorptions, in a material surrounded by a moderator due to a neutron flux incident on the assembly. Here the main advantage of using the adjoint method as opposed to the conventional real-flux shell-source calculations is a significant reduction in computer time. The reactions induced by each group of source neutrons is obtained from one run of an adjoint problem. To obtain the same information from real-flux calculations we need an individual run for every energy group g. Computer time savings ranging by a factor of 5 to 30 are representative. The theory previously reported by one of us (H.A.S.) in the classified literature is derived and subsequently applied to the following problems. a. the fissions induced in a spherical plutonium-detector foil separated by a moderating layer from an incident collimated neutron beam; b. a neutron-dose-rate detector device consisting of a lithium iodide crystal to register absorptions surrounded by a sphere of polyethylene; c. the theoretical evaluation of the neutronic coupling coefficient between two reactors, as one might visualize in a clustered-Rover nuclear-reactor rocket-engine system.