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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.
Dong H. Nguyen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 55 | Number 3 | November 1974 | Pages 307-319
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE74-A23457
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transient solutions of a nonlinear nuclear reactor with various temperature-dependent feedbacks are obtained by the modified Newton-Raphson-Kantorovich’s iterative technique. The difference between the first and higher iterates is shown explicitly to be negligible at all times, so that the first iterate represents well the entire solution. It is also shown that the spatial distribution of the neutron flux during transience is dominated by the fundamental mode and that the negligible difference between the second and the first iterates is composed of higher harmonics.—, The maximum flux, the time at which it occurs, and the rate of flux increase are all readily obtained from the solutions. For an increase in reactor buckling and for a positive initial flux disturbance, the neutron flux in a reactor with Newtonian or prompt feedback reaches a finite asymptotic value, whereas that of an adiabatic reactor first rises, then drops off. However, for the same initial conditions, the maximum flux attained in an adiabatic reactor is several fold higher than that of a reactor with Newtonian or prompt feedback.