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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. L. Thomsen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 119 | Number 3 | March 1995 | Pages 167-174
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24082
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The coupled collision probability and interface-current equations in the flat-flux, isotropic approximation are implemented in a light water reactor (LWR) lattice code that is under development. By using traditional Gaussian elimination of the subregion fluxes of the cells, the interface-current equations are turned into a nodal form. In the transformed flux and current equations, expressed in terms of response matrix theory, the coefficients become multiple-flight probabilities, which obey analogous conservation and reciprocity relations as the first-flight probabilities. The convergence of the iterative solution for the interface currents is accelerated by successive overrelaxation (SOR) and global rebalancing techniques. The improvement of the convergence rate is investigated in a series of test calculations. The optimal strategy is found to be alternation between one SOR iteration and three to four free iterations while the rebalancing should be limited to two initial iterations in normal LWR cases.