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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.
Emiliano Masiello, Richard Sanchez
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 190-207
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE07-A2656
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A discontinuous heterogeneous finite element method is presented and discussed. The method is intended for realistic numerical pin-by-pin lattice calculations when an exact representation of the geometric shape of the pins is made without need for homogenization. The method keeps the advantages of conventional discrete ordinate methods, such as fast execution together with the possibility to deal with a large number of spatial meshes, while minimizing the need for geometric modeling. It also provides a complete factorization in space, angle, and energy for the discretized matrices and minimizes, thus, storage requirements. An angular multigrid acceleration technique has also been developed to speed up the rate of convergence of the inner iterations. A particular aspect of this acceleration is the introduction of boundary restriction and prolongation operators that minimize oscillatory behavior and enhance positivity. Numerical tests are presented that show the high precision of the method and the efficiency of the angular multigrid acceleration.