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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.
Taro Ueki, Forrest B. Brown, D. Kent Parsons, James S. Warsa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 148 | Number 3 | November 2004 | Pages 374-390
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE03-95
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the nuclear engineering community, the error propagation of the Monte Carlo fission source distribution through cycles is known to be a linear Markov process when the number of histories per cycle is sufficiently large. In the statistics community, linear Markov processes with linear observation functions are known to have an autoregressive moving average (ARMA) representation of orders p and p - 1. Therefore, one can perform ARMA fitting of the binned Monte Carlo fission source in order to compute physical and statistical quantities relevant to nuclear criticality analysis. In this work, the ARMA fitting of a binary Monte Carlo fission source has been successfully developed as a method to compute the dominance ratio, i.e., the ratio of the second-largest to the largest eigenvalues. The method is free of binning mesh refinement and does not require the alteration of the basic source iteration cycle algorithm. Numerical results are presented for problems with one-group isotropic, two-group linearly anisotropic, and continuous-energy cross sections. Also, a strategy for the analysis of eigenmodes higher than the second-largest eigenvalue is demonstrated numerically.