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2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.
A. K. Agrawal, J. G. Guppy, I. K. Madni, V. Quan, W. L. Weaver III, J. W. Yang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 64 | Number 2 | October 1977 | Pages 480-491
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27384
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The transient simulation of a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) plant requires (a) modeling of all processes that may be encountered and (b) the development of numerical methods to solve them. All models needed for the thermohydraulic simulation of the whole plant are formulated in this paper. We examine numerical techniques required to solve the governing equations, which are hyperbolic and parabolic partial-differential equations and ordinary differential equations. It appears that the implicit (or partially implicit) scheme is most suitable to meet both the stability and accuracy requirements. A new approach, labeled as the multistep scheme, to efficiently solve the entire system is then presented and illustrated through an example. For a simplified test problem, the multistep scheme has been found to be more efficient (by a factor of 2 to 3) than the commonly used single-step methods. This effort has resulted in the creation of a system transient simulation code, called SSC, for LMFBRs.