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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.
James T. Waber, Mary Repar Kline, Leah K. Johnson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 4 | Number 3 | September 1958 | Pages 341-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE58-A25533
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effect of alloying on the amount of plutonium required in forming a critical mass of each alloy has been expressed in terms of an inventory requirement ratio, RI. This quantity was obtained for twenty-seven potential alloying elements at three compositional levels. The effectiveness of using Vegard’s law to estimate the density of the alloys was appraised by comparing the estimated densities and RI values of nine intermetallic compounds with their x-ray densities and the RI values computed from them. The parametric variation of RI with fT, the number of excess neutrons per collision was also studied.