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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.
S. N. Purohit, A. K. Rajagopal
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 13 | Number 3 | July 1962 | Pages 250-260
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A26160
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A general mathematical formalism for the energy transfer moments and their associated integrals, useful in the study of neutron thermalization, is presented. This formalism has been employed to obtain these quantities for the “general Doppler approximation” case, which represents a large number of approximations that belong to the Doppler class. An exact formula for M2 (the second energy transfer moment weighted by the Maxwellian distribution) is given in terms of binding parameters for the general Doppler case. A new, useful Doppler approximation, which satisfies the Detailed Balance theorem and is based upon the Debye-Waller factor and the specific heat integral, is also formulated. A comparative study has been undertaken of this and three other previously known Doppler cases (the monatomic gas model, the effective temperature, and the Krieger-Nelkin approximations for rotating molecules) in terms of the validity of the Detailed Balance theorem and the asymptotic scattering behavior. Numerical results based upon the Debye frequency distribution of vibrational modes in the Doppler approximation are presented.