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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.
Taro Ueki
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 160 | Number 2 | October 2008 | Pages 242-252
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE160-242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stationarity diagnostics of source distribution in the iterated-source Monte Carlo computation for nuclear criticality and static nuclear reactor analysis have been studied using relative entropy and the Wilcoxon signed rank sum. Novel aspects of the diagnostics are (a) the relative entropy of permuted and nonpermuted source distributions and (b) a series of differenced relative entropies. Item (a) combined with averaging over random permutations has some smoothing effect on the fluctuation through iteration cycles. The benefit of item (b) is twofold: The differencing works as decorrelation, and the mean in stationarity of a differenced series is exactly zero. Therefore, the Wilcoxon signed rank sum has been applied to check the stationarity of the differenced relative entropy series. Another novel aspect of the diagnostics is the use of a problem-independent number of iteration cycles preceding the current iteration cycle upon the computation of the Wilcoxon signed rank sum. In addition, it has been shown that the progressive relative entropy in previous work can be used and the moving average of the Wilcoxon signed rank sums of its differenced series is a stringent measure of stationarity. Numerical results are presented for two- and three-dimensional modeling of an initial core of pressurized water reactors.