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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.
S. Rauck, R. Sanchez, I. Zmijarevic, M. Nobile
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 135 | Number 1 | May 2000 | Pages 73-83
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE00-A2126
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Through the introduction of appropriate boundary conditions, the use of multigroup albedos permits one to concentrate the numerical effort of solving the transport equation in only the domain of interest, thus reducing computational requirements. Multigroup albedos that are representative of an external medium can be calculated via independent transport calculations and collapsed for use in a few-group three-dimensional transport calculation. The multigroup albedo method is developed and applied to the calculation of the Orphée research reactor. Numerical comparisons between full-core two-dimensional transport calculations and two-dimensional transport calculations performed with multigroup albedos show why the method is interesting. The axial power distribution obtained from a three-dimensional transport calculation with multigroup albedos precisely matches measured experimental values, while results from three-dimensional full-core diffusion calculations give unacceptable errors.