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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.
Charles Erwin Cohn
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 5 | Number 5 | May 1959 | Pages 331-335
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE59-A25605
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental investigation was made of the statistical fluctuations in neutron intensity which occur in a nuclear reactor. An ion chamber was exposed to reactor flux, and the fluctuations in its output current were analyzed in a tunable bandpass filter to get the frequency spectrum of these fluctuations, which has the shape of the square modulus of the transfer function. Results are presented of some measurements made on various low-power experimental reactors at Argonne National Laboratory. For reactors with prompt neutron lifetime between 15 and 70 μsec, the quantity l/β was determined within 5 per cent or better from a least squares fit to the transfer function thus measured.