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 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
On moving fast and breaking things
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
So much of what is happening in federal nuclear policy these days seems driven by a common approach popularized in the technology sector. Silicon Valley calls it “move fast and break things,” a phrase originally associated with Facebook’s early culture under Mark Zuckerberg. The idea emerged in the early 2000s as software companies discovered that rapid iteration, frequent experimentation, and a willingness to tolerate failure could dramatically accelerate innovation. This philosophy helped drive the growth of the social media, smartphones, cloud computing, and digital platforms that now underpin modern economic and social life.
Today, that mindset is also influencing federal nuclear policy. The Trump administration views accelerated nuclear deployment as part of a broader competition with China for technological and AI leadership. In that context, it seems willing to accept greater operational risk in pursuit of strategic advantage and long-term economic and security objectives.
Anurag Gupta, R. S. Modak
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 87-103
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1668655
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo calculations for the evaluation of fundamental mode solution of k-eigenvalue problems generally make use of the Power Iteration (PI) method, which suffers from poor convergence, particularly in the case of large, loosely coupled systems. In the present paper, a method called Meyer’s Subspace Iteration (SSI) method, also called the Simultaneous vector iteration algorithm, is applied for the Monte Carlo solution of the k-eigenvalue problem. The SSI method is the block generalization of the single-vector PI method and has been found to work efficiently for solving the problem with the deterministic neutron transport setup. It is found that the convergence of the fundamental k-eigenvalue and corresponding fission source distribution improves substantially with the SSI-based Monte Carlo method as compared to the PI-based Monte Carlo method. To reduce the extra computational effort needed for simultaneous iterations with several vectors, a novel procedure is adopted in which it takes almost the same effort as with the single-vector PI-based Monte Carlo method. The algorithm is applied to several one-dimensional slab test cases of varying difficulty, and the results are compared with the standard PI method. It is observed that unlike the PI method, the SSI-based Monte Carlo method converges quickly and does not require many inactive generations before the mean and variance of eigenvalues could be estimated. It has been demonstrated that the SSI method can simultaneously find a set of the most dominant higher k-eigenmodes in addition to the fundamental mode solution.