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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.
Richard Sanchez, Norman J. McCormick
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 147 | Number 3 | July 2004 | Pages 249-274
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE04-A2432
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The limitations of asymptotic methods for numerically solving highly forward peaked scattering (HFPS) problems are reviewed before resorting to a discrete ordinates solution for such problems based on biased angular quadrature formulas to increase the precision of the angular representation and on source evaluation from cell-averaged angular fluxes to reduce memory requirements. Also, a twice-collided source is introduced to avoid numerical representation of singularities in the solution. As an example the propagation and spreading of a collimated particle beam in an HFPS medium has been calculated with a discrete ordinates diamond-differenced numerical solution of the transport equation in two-dimensional curvilinear cylindrical coordinates. The calculation was carried out for a strongly forward peaked Henyey-Greenstein scattering law for which Fokker-Planck asymptotic models are not valid. The results show promise for numerically calculated reference solutions based on accurate spatial representations for checking the accuracy of standard asymptotic models for these types of problems.