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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.
H. Alan Robitaille, John S. Hewitt
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 63 | Number 4 | August 1977 | Pages 391-400
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27056
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The spectrum of neutrons in thermal pseudo-equilibrium with a mixture of partially hydrogenated terphenyls and high-boiling polymers, an organic material known commercially as HB40, has been measured at room temperature. The spectrum was measured in each of seven mixtures of HB40 and a thermal-neutron absorber, trimethyl borate, in various concentrations. The spectra were determined by the time-of-flight method using the University of Toronto linear electron accelerator as a pulsed source of fast neutrons. These spectra were compared with those calculated using several different bound-hydrogen approximations to the actual energy transfer kernel for the mixture. Of these approximations, the best agreement between theory and experiment occurred for a scattering kernel derived using the diphenyl and the polyethylene scattering kernels, combined according to a weighting scheme reflecting the degree of hydrogenation of the organic material.