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2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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.
B. M. Rothleder, G. R. Poetschat, W. S. Faught, W. J. Eich
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 100 | Number 4 | December 1988 | Pages 440-450
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A23577
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fuel shuffling problem is posed by the need to reposition partially burned assemblies to achieve minimum X-Y pin power peaks in reload cycles of pressurized water reactors. This problem is a classic artificial intelligence (AI) problem and is highly suitable for AI expert system solution assistance, in contrast to the conventional solution, which ultimately depends solely on trial and error. Such a fuel shuffling assistant would significantly reduce engineering and computer execution time for conventional loading patterns and, much more importantly, even more significantly for lowleakage loading patterns. A successful hardware /software demonstrator has been introduced, paving the way for development of a broadly applicable expert system program. Such a program, upon incorporating the recently developed technique of reverse depletion, would provide a directed path for solving the low-leakage problem.