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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.
John P. Church
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 21 | Number 1 | January 1965 | Pages 49-61
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A21015
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The integral neutron-transport equation is solved for the space-dependent mono-energetic neutron density in a unit cell. By using step functions to represent the spatial dependence of the collision probabilities, one may rearrange the integro-differential transport equation in a special way such that the left-hand side contains only the leakage term and the term describing the total collision probability for the homogeneous medium of one region, k′, of the original problem. The Green's-function technique is then used to convert the integro-differential equation to an integral equation. Thus, although the resulting equation may be applied to a heterogeneous cell, the kernel of the equation depends only on the total collision probability in the particular region k′. Numerical results are presented for a two-region unit cell in slab geometry and compared with published results of DSN, PN double-PN and variational calculations. For unit cells that are of the order of two mean free paths or less in thickness, the zeroth-order spherical harmonic approximation for this method yields results comparable to very high order DSN, PN and double-PN calculations. Further, once the Green's function has been computed, additional cell calculations can be performed with relatively little additional computational effort.