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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.
M. G. Silbert
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 51 | Number 4 | August 1973 | Pages 376-384
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE73-A23273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neutron-induced fission cross section of 249Cf was measured from 13 eV to 3 MeV. Neutrons from the Physics-8 underground nuclear explosion traversed a 240-m vertical evacuated flight path and interacted at ground level with a 249Cf sample and with neutron flux monitors. Abundant fission was observed throughout the neutron energy region studied, although the several-MeV cross section was lower than expected on the basis of systematics. Forty-three resonances between 15 and 70 eV were parameterized using a multilevel R-matrix formalism. In this energy region, the average level spacing, corrected for five postulated unobserved levels, was 1.07 ± 0.14 eV, both spin states of the compound nucleus being taken together. Assuming both spin states to have the same properties, the s-wave neutron strength function per spin state 〈〉/〈D〉 was (1.5 ± 0.3) × The average reduced neutron width 〈〉 was 0.31 ± 0.08 meV. For 35 well-defined resonances between 15 and 70 eV, the average fission width 〈Γƒ〉 was 180 meV.