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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.
Han Gon Kim, Soon Heung Chang, Byung Ho Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 113 | Number 1 | January 1993 | Pages 70-76
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE93-A23994
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In pressurized water reactors, the fuel reloading problem has significant meaning in terms of both safety and economics. The local power peaking factor must be kept lower than a predetermined value during a cycle, and the effective multiplication factor must be maximized to extract the maximum energy. If these core parameters could be obtained in a very short time, the optimal fuel reloading patterns would be found more effectively and quickly. A very fast core parameter prediction system is developed using the backpropagation neural network. This system predicts the core parameters several hundred times as fast as the reference numerical code, within an error of a few percent. The effects of the variation of the training rate coefficients, the momentum, and the hidden layer units are also discussed.