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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
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 151 | Number 3 | November 2005 | Pages 283-292
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-A2547
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The criterion of information-theoretic stationarity diagnostics for the Monte Carlo simulation of nuclear criticality has been extended to undersampling diagnostics. Here, undersampling diagnostics means the posterior checking of the number of neutron histories per cycle. A statistically sound criterion using Shannon and relative entropies is defined based on the inequality with a penalty term for the minimum descriptive length of instantaneously decodable encoding. An alternative criterion based on a large sample property of particle population is defined within the information-theoretic framework of the asymptotic equipartition property and the method of types. An auxiliary criterion is proposed using the concave property of Shannon entropy. Numerical results are presented for the "k-effective of the world" problem by Whitesides. The results indicate that the estimation bias of the neutron effective multiplication factor will be reduced to a practically negligible level if these criteria are satisfied. It can be concluded that equilibrium is a stronger condition than stationarity concerning the source distribution in the Monte Carlo simulation.