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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.
R. W. Schaefer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 103 | Number 2 | October 1989 | Pages 196-209
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE89-5
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experiments done in several critical assemblies of the liquid-metal-cooled fast reactor type simulated core axial expansion, core radial expansion and bowing, coolant expansion, and control driveline expansion. For the most part, new experimental techniques were developed to perform these experiments. Calculations of the experiments basically used design-level methods except when it was necessary to investigate complexities peculiar to the experiments. It was found that these feedback reactivities generally are overpredicted, but the predictions are within 30% of the experimental values.