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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.
M. Segev, M. Caner
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 112 | Number 1 | September 1992 | Pages 43-53
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE92-A23950
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A WIMS-based calculational route for pebble-bed fuel has been established. An outstanding advantage of the WIMS code is its integrated route from basic lattice data to burnup-dependent lattice cross sections. The problem in applying WIMS to pebble-bed fuel is that it lacks spherical geometry. This problem is solved by establishing a number of practical equivalences enabling the replacement of a lattice of spherical fuels by a lattice of cylindrical fuels. A special program was written to convert physical data into WIMS input files, including the Dan-coff factor required for resonance shielding in the multilayer multicell pebble lattice. This capacity provides all that is necessary to generate core-homogenized cross sections directly applicable to core studies. Also generated are zone-homogenized cross sections; in some cases, their use in a transport code results in more accurate core-homogenized cross sections. In terms of the fuel infinite criticality factor, this added accuracy is in the range of 1 to 3 mk for fuel free of absorbers or fuel carrying boron-only absorbers; it is in the range of 3 to 12 mk for fuel carrying hafnium absorbers.