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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.
James N. Anno
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 16 | Number 4 | August 1963 | Pages 357-362
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE63-A26545
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transient-temperature behavior following a step change in internal heat generation has been analyzed to determine the power generation in the Battelle Shielding Facility fission plate. The fission plate is employed for shielding studies as a radiation source with a fission energy distribution. The plate is a 28-in. diam, 0.0199-in. thick uranium disk containing 3741 gm of uranium enriched to 93.14% in the uranium-235 isotope. It is plated with 0.0007 in. of nickel and clad with 0.025 in. of aluminum on each side and is in intimate contact with a 0.25-in. thick aluminum plate on one side. Ceramic spacers provide airgap insulation of the fission-aluminum plate combination from the surrounding media. Resistance thermometers were employed to observe the transient-temperature behavior following a step change in the internal heat generation in the plate for fission heating and for cooling tests. The cooling curve data were strictly exponential and rendered a decay constant of 0.0517 min−1 which was utilized, along with the physical constants of the assembly, to render a solution to the transient-heating equation and an estimated power of 25.0 ± 0.6 watts.