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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.
Karl O. Ott
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 99 | Number 1 | May 1988 | Pages 13-27
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A23541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The longer term response of oxide- and metal-fueled liquid-metal-cooled reactors to unscrammed loss-of-flow and loss-of-heat-sink failures is investigated. The investigation consists of a review of numerical transient calculations performed by the Argonne National Laboratory Reactor Analysis and Safety Division, and of analytical analyses of semiasymptotic states. The emphasis is on the identification and evaluation of an inherent shutdown state for metal fuel, with its high heat conductivity, as an alternative to the familiar low-power asymptotic critical state. Design implications for retaining the inherently effected shutdown for a sufficiently long period are discussed and quantitatively evaluated. In addition, the effect of uncertainties of reactivity coefficients on predictions for such unscrammed transients is investigated. It is shown how measurements during a preoperational safety demonstration phase can validate and possibly correct those predictions.