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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.
Norman J. McCormick
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 137 | Number 3 | March 2001 | Pages 359-363
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2195
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The spherical harmonics (PN) solution at the surface of a source-free half-space is investigated to determine conditions for which exact results can be obtained with an approximation of any odd order N. For isotropic scattering, an exact solution for the net current can be obtained if the incident illumination comes from an isotropic plane source, which extends the observation of Garcia and Siewert that an exact solution for the scalar flux can be obtained if the incident illumination is constant with the cosine of the polar angle. An exact solution for the scalar flux at the interface between two isotropic-scattering, half-space media also can be obtained with a finite N for a spatially uniform source in one half-space.