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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.
Y. A. Chao, P. Huang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 103 | Number 4 | December 1989 | Pages 415-419
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE89-A23693
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A superfast, multidimensional, and compact pressurized water reactor nodal code, SUPERNOVA (SPNOVA), which is much faster than conventional nodal codes and is very accurate, has been developed at Westinghouse Electric Corporation. A kinetics version of this code, SPNOVA-K, is now developed for applications to three-dimensional core kinetics analysis. The theory involved in the kinetics generalization of SPNOVA is discussed and the performance of SPNOVA-K is described. SPNOVA-K adopts the stiffness confinement method of time variable discretization. This method can provide a very stable solution against the size of the discrete time step, allowing much larger step sizes to be used.