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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.
Eric Lukosi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 188 | Number 3 | December 2017 | Pages 294-302
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1367248
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the computational performance of microfluidic channels (MFCs) within a semiconductor detector to monitor changes in the elemental and isotopic composition of a UOX pressurized water reactor used nuclear fuel dissolved in a KCl/LiCl molten salt. The results indicate that the use of MFC limits alpha energy loss sufficiently enough to use energy windowing techniques in spectral analysis. It was found that elemental and isotopic changes as low as 1% may be feasible, with the time to detection (TTD) ranging from seconds to hours. The TTD is inversely dependent on the number of MFCs within the sensor and the activity of the element/isotope undergoing concentration transients.