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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.
P. E. Labeau
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 126 | Number 2 | June 1997 | Pages 131-145
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24467
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Probabilistic dynamics offers a general Markovian framework for a dynamic treatment of reliability. Monte Carlo simulation appears to be a powerful and flexible tool to deal with the high dimensionality of realistic applications. Yet an analog game turns out to be ineffective for two main reasons: Very rare events leading to failures are not sampled enough to obtain a good statistical accuracy, and the equations of the dynamics have to be integrated all along each history, which results in very large computation times. Recent improvements in Monte Carlo simulation applied to probabilistic dynamics allow a much faster and more precise estimation of the unreliability of large systems, and they are illustrated on a pressurized water reactor pressurizer.