ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2026
Nuclear Technology
July 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Gregory D. Spriggs
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 114 | Number 4 | August 1993 | Pages 342-351
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE92-78
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An-in-pile experimental technique to measure the decay constants and the relative abundances of the delayed neutron groups applicable for a given reactor system is presented. The method is based on a least-squares-fitting technique that simultaneously fits a series of transients produced by small reactivity perturbations to a reactor operating initially at delayed critical. The function that is least-squares fit is the analytic solution (written in terms of an arbitrary number of delayed neutron groups) as obtained by the point reactor model for the reactor response following a step change in reactivity. The application of the method does not require any knowledge of the size of the reactivity perturbations, and the method is independent of the detector efficiency. The results are based solely on the measurable quantities of relative power, time, and one measurable root of the Inhour equation.