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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.
Edgar Kiefhaber
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 111 | Number 2 | June 1992 | Pages 197-204
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE92-A23933
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For high-accuracy criticality calculations, one should take into account the difference in the energy distributions between prompt and delayed fission neutrons. In steady-state reactor calculations, it is usually assumed that delayed and prompt neutrons are emitted with the same energy distribution. This approximation may lead to systematic deviations in keffof between −0.2 and +0.05%. While for typical cores of liquid-metal-cooled fast reactors and corresponding critical assemblies the effect is usually fairly small, it may become more important for low-enriched k∞ experiments and for highly enriched, high-leakage cores. For group cross-section adjustment procedures usually covering a wide range of critical assemblies with fairly different nuclear characteristics, a proper treatment of the energy distributions of delayed neutrons could be particularly important for excluding systematic differences as far as possible.