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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.
Lowell H. Holway, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 6 | Number 3 | September 1959 | Pages 191-201
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE59-A25659
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The multigroup diffusion equations are solved formally by expanding the flux in each group in a series of eigenfunctions of the scalar Helmholtz equation. The resulting secular determinant is complicated, but a perturbation solution may be developed for the coupled multigroup equations. In the case of one energy group, the perturbation method chosen reduces to a formula simpler to use and more rapidly convergent than the Rayleigh-Schroedinger formulas. An operator convenient for expressing the boundary conditions at an interface in multiregion reactors is defined. The foregoing techniques are applied to the Fermi age equation for a reflected reactor. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the rates of convergence in typical reactor design problems.