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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.
Hrabri L. Rajic, Abderrafi M. Ougouag
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 103 | Number 4 | December 1989 | Pages 392-408
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE89-A23691
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A nodal multigroup neutron diffusion method for modern computer architectures has been developed and implemented in the ILLICO code. Vectorization and parallelization strategies that are successful in speeding up modern nodal computations on commercially available supercomputers have been identified and applied. Realistic three-dimensional benchmark problems can be solved in the vectorized mode in <0.73 s (33.86 Mflops). Vector-concurrent implementations are shown to yield speedups as high as 9.19 on eight processors. These results demonstrate that modern nodal methods, such as ILLICO, can preserve essentially all of their speed advantages (demonstrated on scalar computers) over finite difference methods. Several ways of treating two-dimensional reactor problems with nonsquare (“jagged”) boundaries as rectangular domain problems are presented and their effectiveness evaluated. They result in nonnegligible performance improvements and can be devised so as to preserve the physics of the initial problem.