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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.
Jennifer L. Liscum-Powell, Anil B. Prinja, Jim E. Morel, Leonard J. Lorence, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 142 | Number 3 | November 2002 | Pages 270-291
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE142-270
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel approach is proposed for charged particle transport calculations using a recently developed second-order, self-adjoint angular flux (SAAF) form of the Boltzmann transport equation with continuous slowing-down. A finite element discretization that is linear continuous in space and linear discontinuous (LD) in energy is described and implemented in a one-dimensional, planar geometry, multigroup, discrete ordinates code for charged particle transport. The cross-section generating code CEPXS is used to generate the electron and photon transport cross sections employed in this code. The discrete ordinates SAAF transport equation is solved using source iteration in conjunction with an inner iteration acceleration scheme and an outer iteration acceleration scheme. Outer iterations are required with the LD energy discretization scheme because the two angular flux unknowns within each group are coupled, which gives rise to effective upscattering. The inner iteration convergence is accelerated using diffusion synthetic acceleration, and the outer iteration convergence is accelerated using a diamond difference approximation to the LD energy discretization. Computational results are given that demonstrate the effectiveness of our convergence acceleration schemes and the accuracy of our discretized SAAF equation.