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August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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.
Victor E. Grob, E. Santandrea, Hilmar Ritz
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 7 | Number 6 | June 1960 | Pages 514-524
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE60-A25760
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As part of the Yankee and the Belgian Reactor-3 Critical Experiments program at the Westinghouse Reactor Evaluation Center, measurements have been made of the parameters leading to p, f, and ϵ in a light-water moderated heterogeneous reactor with slightly enriched UO2 fuel rods clad in stainless steel. A detailed description of this reactor is given in reference 1. Measurements were made using 4.48% and 2.73% enriched fuel with lattice pitches of 0.470 and 0.435 in. The individual UO2 sintered pellets, in the fuel rods, had a diameter of 0.300 in. and a length of 0.600 in. The 4.48% and 2.73% fuel rods contained 90 and 80 pellets, respectively. The stainless steel cladding was 0.305 in. i.d. and 0.347 in. o.d. for the 4.48% enriched fuel, and 0.306 in. i.d. and 0.338 in. o.d. in the case of 2.73% enrichment. The measurements were performed using a higher fuel enrichment than used previously at Bettis (2, 3) and elsewhere for similar experiments, thus uncovering a large unexplored range of enrichments.