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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.
R. A. Rydin, M. L. Woosley, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 126 | Number 3 | July 1997 | Pages 341-344
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24486
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a dynamic simulation method recently developed for accelerator-driven subcritical waste transmutation systems, power levels are renormalized dynamically based on the changing reactivity of the flowing system. For such systems, the power varies directly with the source strength, and inversely with the reactivity. The prompt-jump form of the point-kinetics equations has been used to provide the dynamic renormalization factor for the spatially dependent flowing-fuel system. A unique characteristic of the source-dominated system has been discovered. In the traditional reactor system, power changes are controlled by the half-life for decay of the longest-lived delayed neutron precursors. For the source-dominated system, the delayed neutron precursors do not appreciably slow the response of the system.