ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2026
Nuclear Technology
July 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Sadao Uchikawa, Tsutomu Okubo, Yoshihiro Nakano
Nuclear Technology | Volume 172 | Number 2 | November 2010 | Pages 132-142
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A10900
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The FLWR is a boiling water reactor type with a core consisting of hexagonal-shaped fuel assemblies with a triangular-lattice fuel rod configuration, which has been proposed in order to ensure a sustainable energy supply in the future based on well-established light water reactor technologies. This paper proposes a new concept of fuel assembly design named FLWR/MIX. The first stage of FLWR is designed to conserve plutonium effectively with a fissile plutonium conversion ratio of around 1.0, keeping negative void reactivity characteristics. Enriched UO2 fuel rods are arranged in the peripheral region of the assembly, surrounding the mixed oxide (MOX) fuel rods in the central region. Performance evaluation shows that the FLWR/MIX concept is effective for controlling the void reactivity characteristics in the tight-lattice fuel rod configuration and is promising under the framework of the UO2 and MOX fuel technologies and related infrastructures that have been established for the current LWR-MOX utilization.