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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.
Ang Zhu, Yunlin Xu, Thomas Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 186 | Number 1 | April 2017 | Pages 23-37
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1272387
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fourier analysis of the continuous infinite homogenous multigroup (MG) formulation is investigated in this paper for the time-dependent Boltzmann transport equation using discrete ordinates formulation. In addition, a continuous two-group (2G) and one-group (1G) Fourier analysis is performed to generate an analytical spectral radius and provide the basis for a theoretical analysis of the convergence. The discrete 1G formulation is then presented, and the theoretical analysis is found to predict the same spectral radius as the continuous 1G formulation. A typical pressurized water reactor pin cell problem with 47-group library is then homogenized with reflective boundary conditions, and the numerical spectral radius is calculated using the MPACT code. The theoretical predictions and the numerical results from the pin cell case agree very well and are found to have the following behavior: (1) The spectral radius is usually very close to unity for standard parameters for realistic transient application, (2) the spectral radius generally decreases as a function of inners per outer M, (3) the spectral radius generally decreases as a function of time-step size and then increases beyond unity for extremely small time steps, and (4) the spectral radius is almost constant as a function of the inserted reactivity. Good agreement is observed with the MG Fourier analysis. Finally, it is shown that the group sweeping coarse mesh finite difference method is theoretically and numerically very slow to converge the time-dependent neutron transport equation and that it is necessary to move the right-hand-side fission and transient source to the left-hand side and to solve the entire matrix form of the system.