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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.
M. Dion, G. Marleau
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 179 | Number 2 | February 2015 | Pages 186-198
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-90
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method is proposed to evaluate implicit sensitivity coefficients for several types of reactor lattices, including pressurized water reactors and CANDU (CANada Deuterium Uranium) reactors, with different resonant and light isotope contents. The implicit sensitivity of the multiplication factor, resulting from a variation of an isotope density through the self-shielded cross sections, is computed for different cases. The precision of the method, the importance of the implicit coefficients with respect to the total sensitivity, and the contributions of all the isotopes are discussed and compared for the different systems. We also show how to compute the sensitivity coefficients in the unresolved energy groups, where the details of the resonances are not known. An equivalent dilution model is used for the self-shielding calculations. Complete transport calculations, using a collision probability method, are also used to compute reference values for the implicit sensitivities.