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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.
M. Marseguerra, E. Zio, F. Cadini
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 3 | March 2007 | Pages 386-394
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE07-A2671
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inefficient control of the water level in a steam generator of a nuclear power plant is responsible for frequent unscheduled reactor trips. This problem is particularly critical at low power, when the steam generator exhibits the "swell and shrink" phenomenon and flow rate measurements are highly unreliable. The design of a proper controller capable of avoiding expensive shutdowns is eagerly sought for increasing the availability of the plant. In this paper, we present an extension of an adaptive, stable, fuzzy controller, whose design parameters are optimized via a genetic algorithm. Computer simulations confirm that the devised controller bears good performances in terms of small oscillations and fast settling time even in the presence of steam flow disturbances.