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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.
Roberto Orsi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 154 | Number 2 | October 2006 | Pages 247-259
Computer Code Abstract | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2631
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The finite difference approach poses a major problem of keeping the exact values of material zone areas and volumes in any geometric simulation for transport calculations. When this requirement is not thoroughly fulfilled, updating density values may be necessary to conserve material zone masses. A method is described that conserves the mass of geometrically complex material zones simulated on both Cartesian and cylindrical mesh grids and its implementation in BOT3P5.0, which is the latest version of the BOT3P code package, publicly and freely available from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency Data Bank. BOT3P5.0 lets users optionally require as refined a computation as desired of the possible area and volume error of material zones due to the stair-cased geometry representation and automatically corrects material densities to globally conserve masses. BOT3P5.0 optionally stores on binary outputs the detailed material zone distribution map inside each cell of the mesh grid according to a submesh grid refinement defined in input by the user and the area and volume fraction distribution of the different material zones contained in meshes at zone interfaces. That also allows a local (per-cell) density correction as an alternative to the approach of a uniform density correction on the whole zone domain and makes it possible to perform material zone homogenization locally and transport analyses more accurately.