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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.
Kiyonobu Yamashita, Isao Murata, Ryuichi Shindo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 110 | Number 2 | February 1992 | Pages 177-185
Technical Notes | doi.org/10.13182/NSE92-A23887
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The accuracy of the nuclear design code system for the High-Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR) is evaluated for the neutronic characteristics that depend on core temperature by analyzing the overall temperature coefficients of reactivity and the effective multiplication factors obtained by an experiment in which the Very High Temperature Reactor Critical Assembly (VHTRC) is heated from ambient temperature to 200°C. The core of the VHTRC consists of block-type fuel containing low-enriched uranium (LEU). The nuclear design code system for the HTTR includes the DELIGHT, TWOTRAN-2, and CITATION-1000VP computer codes. The DELIGHT code is a one-dimensional cell burnup code developed to evaluate the nuclear characteristics of HTTR fuel and to calculate the group constants. The calculated overall temperature coefficients of reactivity between ambient temperature and 200°C agree well with the measured coefficients, and the calculated effective multiplication factors for different temperatures agree with measured factors within an uncertainty of 0.6%. From the results, it is concluded that the nuclear design code system for the HTTR predicts well the temperature-dependent neutronic characteristics of a core containing LEU fuel.