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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.
G. C. Pomraning
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 127 | Number 2 | October 1997 | Pages 182-198
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A28596
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The problem of describing steady-state transport of a perpendicularly incident particle beam through a thin slab of material is considered. For a scattering kernel sufficiently peaked in momentum transfer to allow a Fokker-Planck description of the scattering process in both energy and angle, an approximate closed form solution to this problem was obtained almost 50 yr ago and is referred to as the Fermi-Eyges formula. It is shown that a Fermi-Eyges-like formula can be derived for a broader class of scattering kernels. This class consists of scattering described by the continuous slowing-down approximation (the Fokker-Planck description in energy), but not sufficiently forward peaked in angle to allow an angular Fokker-Planck representation. This generalized formula reduces to the classic Fermi-Eyges result for scattering operators with a valid Fokker-Planck limit and also describes problems that, while involving a forward-peaked scattering kernel, do not possess a Fokker-Planck description. A classic example of such a kernel is the Henyey-Greenstein kernel, and the Fermi-Eyges-like solution in this case exhibits more beam spreading than that predicted by the classic Fermi-Eyges formula. In particular, the scalar flux is non-Gaussian in the radial coordinate, as contrasted with the Gaussian Fermi-Eyges result.