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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.
HENRI B. SMETS
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 11 | Number 4 | December 1961 | Pages 428-433
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE61-A26044
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stability and instability properties of homogeneous nuclear reactors with a single temperature coefficient of reactivity which is temperature dependent are studied by means of Liapounoff's Second Method. The special case of a temperature coefficient linearly dependent on temperature is solved completely for a space-independent model and it is shown that all solutions are bounded and tend asymptotically to a constant if the reactivity decreases as the temperature approaches large values. In some conditions, the reactor has two stable equilibrium points (bistable).