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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, Z. Ould Amar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 126 | Number 2 | June 1997 | Pages 146-157
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24468
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo games especially designed for probabilistic dynamics problems have been shown to be very efficient for the calculation of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) pressurizer unreliability. However, these methods rely on the implicit hypothesis that transition rates and probabilities, as well as control means response times, can be precisely determined. But reality is different: Because of a lack of knowledge, only crude estimations of transition rates can be obtained. Moreover, control device response times cannot be assumed constant for rapid transients. Therefore, considering distributed values of these quantities seems more realistic. Several attempts to take into account these uncertainties, while conserving as many advantages as possible of the high-efficiency simulation techniques, are summarized. The PWR pressurizer application is used to compare the capabilities of the proposed methods.