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Launching into tomorrow: NRIC guides new era of research and deployment
In June 2025, the Department of Energy announced the Reactor Pilot Program, an authorization pathway that allowed reactor developers to partner with the DOE to get first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors built and tested. Soon after, the DOE rolled out a complementary Fuel Line Pilot Program, which aimed to fast-track fuel projects. In all, 20 projects were accepted into the new programs.
Zhe Chuan Tan, Zhi Yuan Feng, Kan Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 1 | March 2026 | Pages S456-S465
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2456895
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With growing interest in accident-tolerant dispersion fuels such as fully ceramic micro-encapsulated fuel, explicit modeling processes play an increasingly important role in the precise simulation of particle transport in stochastic media. The Random Sequential Addition (RSA) method and Discrete Element Method (DEM) are considered the more mature and accurate explicit modeling processes. RSA is inherently inhibited by an upper limit to the particle packing fraction whereas DEM can become very computationally expensive as the latter simulates physical interactions between each particle in contact. An Iterative RSA-DEM method is proposed to solve the high computational requirements of DEM. An initial number of particles are placed inside the stochastic medium via RSA, and the particles are then subject to free fall via DEM for a preindicated amount of time. Particles are then placed in the remaining unoccupied space of the stochastic medium via the Improved RSA method and once again are subject to free fall via DEM. This process thus iterates until the desired particle packing fraction is achieved. The particles are then redistributed throughout the stochastic medium using a mesh-filling method. The time savings are calculated in two ways: first, by maintaining the particle packing fraction and reducing the particle radius, and second, by directly changing the particle packing fraction. Last, the correctness of Iterative RSA-DEM is verified by comparing the calculated effective multiplication factors with those from the original DEM.