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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.
C. B. Mills
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 13 | Number 4 | August 1962 | Pages 301-305
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A26172
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The complete spatial separation of moderator and uranium fuel bearing regions are shown by experiment to result in critical reactors with low critical mass and relatively uniform fissioning density. Studies of several of these experiments to establish the accuracy of a numerical method of calculation (SNG) for this class of problems show good correspondence between theory and experiment. This method is then used for a useful survey of critical mass and U235 atomic density as a function of geometry for the best moderators, D2O and Be.