President Trump’s Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy,” attached a hard deadline to America’s nuclear ambitions: at least three participants in the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program were meant to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026. That deadline has now passed, and it functions as a real-time stress test of how fast the “nuclear renaissance” rhetoric can translate into operating reactors. The pilot program mechanism.