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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.
Samet Y. Kadioglu, Dana A. Knoll, Cassiano de Oliveira
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 163 | Number 2 | October 2009 | Pages 132-143
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-07
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Coupling neutronics to thermomechanics is important for the analysis of fast burst reactors because the criticality and safety study of fast burst reactors depends on the thermomechanical behavior of fuel materials. For instance, the shutdown mechanism or the transition between supercritical and subcritical states is driven by the fuel material expansion or contraction. The material expansion is due to the temperature gradient that results from fission power. In this paper, we introduce a numerical model for coupling of neutron diffusion and thermomechanics in fast burst reactors. The goal is to have a better understanding of the relation between the reactivity insertion and the thermomechanical response of fuel materials. We perform a nondimensional analysis of the coupled system that provides insight into the behavior of the transient. We also provide a semianalytical solution model to the coupled system for partial verification of our numerical solutions. We studied material behavior corresponding to different levels of reactivity insertion.