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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.
Richard M. Roberds, Charles J. Bridgman
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 64 | Number 2 | October 1977 | Pages 332-343
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27374
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A space-angle synthesis (SAS) method is developed for the steady-state, two-dimensional transport of neutrons and secondary gamma rays from a point source of simulated nuclear-weapon radiation in air. The method is validated by applying it to the problem of neutron transport from a point source in air over a ground interface, and then comparing the results to those obtained by DOT, a discrete-ordinates code. In the method, the energy dependence of the Boltzmann transport equation is treated in the standard multigroup manner. The angular dependence is treated by expanding the flux in specially tailored trial functions and applying the method of weighted residuals that analytically integrates the transport equation over all angles. The trial functions used in the expansion are composed of combinations of selected trial solutions, the trial solutions being shaped ellipsoids that approximate the angular distribution of the neutron flux in one-dimensional space. Differences between DOT and SAS tissue-dose calculations at distances >60 m from the source were generally under 10% and decreased with increasing source or receiver height. Computer computational time was decreased by a factor of ∼7.