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Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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.
S. M. Zivi, M. Epstein, R. W. Wright, J. J. Barghusen, D. H. Cho, F. J. Testa, G. T. Goldfuss, R. W. Mouring
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 56 | Number 3 | March 1975 | Pages 229-240
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE75-A26737
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two in-pile transient experiments were performed in the TREAT Reactor Facility to investigate fuel-coolant interaction phenomena that might occur in a hypothetical prompt-burst disassembly accident involving extensive fuel vaporization in a nearly unvoided liquid-metal fast breeder reactor core. In these tests, a single fuel pin containing 28 g of UO2 was subjected to a self-limited 23-msec-period TREAT power excursion which deposited fission energy of 1700 cal/g of UO2 in the fuel. The pin was contained in an instrumented autoclave filled with stagnant sodium. Failure of the fuel pins occurred at a mean energy input of about 540 cal/g, corresponding to a UO2 vapor pressure of about 100 atm. Results of these tests indicated that no energetic fuel-coolant interaction was produced and that the measured transient pressures can be reasonably described by the time history of the fuel vapor pressure.