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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.
Thomas E. Booth
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 122 | Number 1 | January 1996 | Pages 79-92
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A28549
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The interpretation of the statistical error estimates produced by Monte Carlo transport codes is still somewhat of an art. Empirically, there are variance reduction techniques whose error estimates are almost always reliable, and there are variance reduction techniques whose error estimates are often unreliable. Unreliable error estimates usually result from inadequate large-score sampling from the score distributions’tail.Statisticians believe that more accurate confidence interval statements are possible if the general nature of the score distribution can be characterized. Here, the analytic score distribution for the exponential transform applied to a simple, spatially continuous Monte Carlo transport problem is provided. Anisotropic scattering and implicit capture are included in the theory. In large part, the analytic score distributions that are derived provide the basis for the ten new statistical quality checks in MCNP.