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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.
Sooyoung Choi, Chidong Kong, Deokjung Lee, Mark L. Williams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 180 | Number 1 | May 2015 | Pages 41-57
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-72
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new methodology has been developed recently to treat resonance self-shielding in systems for which the fuel compact region of a reactor lattice consists of small fuel grains dispersed in a graphite matrix. The theoretical development adopts equivalence theory in both micro- and macro-level heterogeneities to provide approximate analytical expressions for the shielded cross sections, which may be interpolated from a table of resonance integrals or Bondarenko factors using a modified background cross section as the interpolation parameter. This paper describes the first implementation of the theoretical equations in a reactor analysis code. To reduce discrepancies caused by use of the rational approximation for collision probabilities in the original derivation, a new formulation for a doubly heterogeneous Bell factor is developed in this paper to improve the accuracy of doubly heterogeneous expressions. The methodology is applied to a wide range of pin cell and assembly test problems with varying geometry parameters, material compositions, and temperatures, and the results are compared with continuous-energy Monte Carlo simulations to establish the accuracy and range of applicability of the new approach. It is shown that the new doubly heterogeneous self-shielding method including the Bell factor correction gives good agreement with reference Monte Carlo results.