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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.
Byoung-Uhn Bae, Yong-Soo Kim, Goon-Cherl Park
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 154 | Number 1 | September 2006 | Pages 74-93
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2619
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As a result of experiments with the Upper Plenum Test Facility and the 1400-MW(electric) Advanced Power Reactor (APR1400), sweepout in the downcomer has been identified as playing an important role in the depletion of the core coolant inventory during a large-break loss-of-coolant accident. In order to identify the sweepout mechanism and estimate the amount of coolant discharged during sweepout, separate-effects tests were performed in a rectangular-type test apparatus 1/5 the scale of the APR1400 downcomer. The experimental results showed that the sweepout was dominantly influenced by the hydraulic behaviors of coolant and steam near the intact cold leg. A sweepout model was developed by correlating the experimental results to analytically derived nondimensional parameters. The developed model showed applicability to the prototype, as the experimental results of the counterpart tests were in good agreement, within <25.0% of the uncertainty band.