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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.
Nam Zin Cho, Jaejun Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 159 | Number 3 | July 2008 | Pages 229-241
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE159-229
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A coarse-mesh nodal method in cylindrical (r, ,z) geometry, e.g., of pebble bed reactors, based on the analytic function expansion nodal (AFEN) methodology, is described in this paper. Two unique features are (a) no use of transverse integration - allowing a nodal scheme in (r, ,z) geometry - and (b) nodal solution expressed in terms of analytic basis functions - leading to high accuracy and readily available reconstruction of homogeneous flux distributions. Additional features of multigroup formulation, two methods of void region treatment, and coarse-group-rebalance acceleration are implemented in the TOPS code and tested on several benchmark problems, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency PBMR-400 Benchmark Problem. The TOPS results are in excellent agreement with those of the VENTURE code, using significantly less computer time.