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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.
Ricardo Diniz, Adimir dos Santos
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 152 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 125-141
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE04-69
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reactor noise approach has been successfully performed at the IPEN/MB-01 research reactor facility to determine experimentally the effective delayed neutron parameters i and i in a six-group model. The method can be considered a novel one because it exploits the very low-frequency domain of the spectral densities. The proposed method has some advantages to other in-pile methods since it does not perturb the reactor system and consequently does not "excite" any sort of harmonic modes. As a by-product and a consistency check, the eff parameter was obtained without the need of the Diven factor and power normalization, and it is in excellent agreement with independent measurements. The theory/experiment comparison shows that for the abundances the JENDL3.3 presents the best performance, while for the decay constants the revised version of ENDF/B-VI.8 shows the best agreement. The best performance for the eff determination is obtained with JENDL3.3. In contrast, ENDF/B-VI.8 and its revised version performed at Los Alamos National Laboratory overestimate eff by as much as 4%. The eff results of this work totally support the proposal by Sakurai and Okajima to reduce the thermal delayed neutron yield of 235U.