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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.
Thomas J. Downar, Jen-Ying Wu, John Steill, Raghunandan Janardhan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 117 | Number 2 | February 1997 | Pages 133-150
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-fidelity simulation of nuclear reactor accidents such as the rupture of a main steam line in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) requires three-dimensional core hydrodynamics modeling because of the strong effect channel cross flow has on reactor kinetics. A parallel nested Krylov linear solver was developed and implemented in the RETRAN-03 reactor systems analysis code to make such high-fidelity core modeling practical on engineering workstations. Domain decomposition techniques were also applied to the RETRAN-03 solution algorithm and demonstrated using a distributed memory parallel computer. Applications were performed for a four-loop Westinghouse PWR steam-line-break accident, and performance improvements of over a factor of 30 were achieved for models with 25 flow channels in the core. Larger models (e.g., 104-core channels), previously inaccessible because of memory limitations, were also solved with practical execution times.