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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.
Kevin T. Clarno, Marvin L. Adams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 149 | Number 2 | February 2005 | Pages 182-196
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE04-31
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present recent improvements in assembly-level calculations for reactor analysis, including modifications that support core-level analysis by quasi-diffusion. Our main focus is on accurately approximating the effects that neighboring assemblies have on the few-group cross sections, assembly discontinuity factors, form factors, and other transport parameters of a given assembly. We show that we can do this by using albedo boundary conditions that are estimated with low computational cost. We also present an efficient way to tabulate these effects to permit accurate interpolation by the core-level algorithm. We describe our algorithms and present results from several difficult test problems containing mixed-oxide and UO2 assemblies. Our methodology significantly reduces the largest errors made by present-day methodology. For example, in our test problems it reduces the maximum pin-power error by a factor of ~5.