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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. S. Barnett
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 50 | Number 4 | April 1973 | Pages 398-401
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE73-A26578
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Consider one-speed model neutron migration in an infinite homogeneous medium. Let a neutron be released from the origin at time zero. A probabilistic argument is used to show that without approximation the neutron’s mean square distance from the origin at time t, given that absorption has not occurred, is , where v is the neutron speed, λs is the scattering mean-free-path, and is the mean cosine of the scattering angle. The expression outside the brace is the diffusion theory result. For large t, the exact result tends to the diffusion theory result, while for small t, the exact result tends to (vt)2, an extreme nondiffusion result.