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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.
K. D. Lathrop
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 119 | Number 1 | January 1995 | Pages 80-86
Technical Notes | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24071
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The cosine of the laboratory scattering angle is derived for a neutron elastically scattering from a nucleus moving with a specified velocity. Scattering is assumed to be isotropic in the center-of-mass system, and the mean cosine of the laboratory scattering angle is calculated and shown to agree with the first Legendre moment of a scattering probability function derived by Blackshaw and Murray. Isotropic neutron-nucleus encounters are further assumed, and a second average is taken to calculate a mean cosine as a function of the neutron-nuclear speed ratio. This mean cosine approaches 2/(3m), where m is the nucleus mass relative to the neutron mass, as the neutron speed becomes large compared with the speed of the nucleus, but for m > 1, the scattering becomes more anisotropic as this speed ratio decreases before approaching isotropy at small neutron-nucleus speed ratios. This single nuclear speed mean cosine is compared with its average over a Maxwellian distribution of nuclear speeds. The two are qualitatively very similar. Taking the single nuclear speed to be the average speed of the Maxwellian distribution gives better quantitative agreement, in a least-squares sense, between the single-speed mean cosine and the Maxwellian average mean cosine than does using the most probable speed of the Maxwellian distribution.