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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.
D. R. Ferguson, K. F. Hansen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 51 | Number 2 | June 1973 | Pages 189-205
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE73-A26594
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A general class of two-step alternating-direction semi-implicit methods is proposed for the approximate solution of the semi-discrete form of the space-dependent reactor kinetics equations. An exponential transformation of the semidiscrete equations is described which has been found to significantly reduce the truncation error when several alternating-direction semi-implicit methods are applied to the transformed equations. A subset of this class is shown to be a consistent approximation to the differential equations and to be numerically stable. Specific members of this subset are compared by considering two-dimensional numerical experiments. An “optimum” method, termed the nonsymmetric alternating-direction explicit method, is extended to three-dimensional geometries. Subsequent three-dimensional numerical experiments confirm the truncation error, accuracy, and stability properties of this method.