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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.
Kohyu Fukunishi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 67 | Number 3 | September 1978 | Pages 296-308
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A27250
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Some attempts have been made to investigate noise sources in a boiling water reactor (BWR) by multivariate random data analyses. Autoregression and multivariate coherency such as partial and/or multiple coherency have been introduced to the analysis of time series data gathered from a medium-sized BWR plant (BWR-3) of 460-MW electric power to evaluate linear relations among multiple inputs and outputs that are coupled with each other by sophisticated feedbacks. Through these attempts, the main local disturbance that leads to the peak in the spectrum of reactor power noise and is classified as global noise has been concluded to be caused by noise sources originated, not outside the reactor core, but inside the reactor core itself Furthermore, the noise sources in the core have been found to be the turbulence of bubble generation and extinction in the lower region of coolant flow channel. It is found that the noise sources have different resonant frequencies that depend on the running speeds of coolant flows in fuel assemblies near the bottom local detector. It can also be shown that pressure waves induced by the local disturbances propagate into the coolant water in the lower core plenum, where they are mixed together into a single-pressure wave whose resonant frequency corresponds to the peak frequency in the spectrum of reactor power noise.