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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.
Won Sik Yang, Thomas J. Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 99 | Number 4 | August 1988 | Pages 353-366
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-353
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The generalized perturbation theory was developed to accommodate constant power core depletion. The resulting adjoint equations are distinguished from the corresponding constant flux depletion system by the coupling of adjacent time intervals in the source of the generalized adjoint flux equation. The method is demonstrated first with an analytic solution to an infinite medium problem. A system of numerical equations is then formulated to be consistent with the number density iteration scheme used to simulate constant power depletion in the code REBUS at Argonne National Laboratory. A two-dimensional (R-Z) fast reactor example similar to that used by previous authors for constant flux depletion is solved here to provide a consistent basis for evaluating the present work. The sensitivity coefficients predicted by constant power depletion perturbation theory are consistently within a few percent of the exact calculation.