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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.
Frank B. Estabrook
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 11 | Number 1 | September 1961 | Pages 43-47
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE61-A25982
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A multigroup diffusion theory is formulated for heterogeneous reactors having periodic arrays of line discontinuities. These discontinuities are idealized cylindrical internal boundaries of an otherwise homogeneous moderating medium, and appropriate mixed-group or multiplying boundary conditions at such boundaries allow Floquet solutions to be found for the neutron fluxes in the moderator. Real superpositions of such Floquet solutions can then give the physical fluxes in finite reactors. The requirement that a Floquet solution in the moderator have the proper thermal flux behavior at a cylindrical internal boundary, to match the thermal flux actually inside a fuel rod, leads to a “criticality” condition, the solutions of which give the spectrum of allowed Floquet solutions. For each of these a relation between material bucklings Bx2, By2, and Bz2 is obtained which is, in general, anisotropic.