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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.
H.Nakamura
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 118 | Number 4 | December 1994 | Pages 235-248
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A21494
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A semiempirical formula for neutron detector responses, to be used to infer reactivities in subcriticality measurements, is presented. A formal theory for the multipoint approximation of the Boltzmann operators makes possible the description of a large variety of nuclear fuel systems by means of an equivalent two-point model that regards a whole system as the coupled system made up of an arbitrary number of nuclear fuels. Because the analytic formula includes the fitting parameter associated with the detector configuration and because the removal of spatial effects or higher mode contaminations in the detector responses is accomplished by devising the detector configurations, the conventional point approximation can be used to infer the reactivity of a far-subcritical system. For an example of an application to existing experiments, the current method is used to analyze subcriticality measurements by using the 252Cf source-driven neutron noise analysis method.