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August 24–27, 2026
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.
T. W. Petrie, G. H. Miley
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 64 | Number 1 | September 1977 | Pages 151-162
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27086
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Phase-space grouping techniques have been applied to two distinct problems in fusion product physics: (a) slowing down drift motion of highly energetic alpha particles in a symmetric toroidal field, and (b) first wall loading by 3.52-MeV alpha particles resulting from magnetic ripple. In the former, a weighted energy-loss approximation method permits the evolving orbits to be determined for any representative phase-space group. This enables rapid computation of several important suprathermal effects in a tokamak plasma. For example, code SYMALF, which embodies this idea, is applied to plasma heating and alpha-particle thermalization source problems. In the ripple field case, a probabilistic density function is employed to determine drift losses associated with ripple-trapped, 3.52-MeV alpha particles. When used to determine 3.52-MeV alpha-particle wall loadings, code RIPALF, which is based on this probability function, predicts the position of local “hot spots” along the first wall.