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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.
Yimeng Chan, Sicong Xiao
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 554-571
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1752045
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The recently developed linear prolongation Coarse Mesh Finite Difference (lpCMFD) acceleration scheme, which employs a linear additive approach to update the scalar flux, has been shown to be more stable and effective than the conventional scaling-based Coarse Mesh Finite Difference (CMFD) method for accelerating the discrete ordinates (SN) neutron transport calculation using spatial finite difference discretization. In this paper, we study and extend the application of lpCMFD to accelerate the SN neutron transport calculation with spatial discretization using the Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method (DGFEM), which generally involves linear- or higher-order space expansion functions. A function space mapping operator is proposed in this paper to project the lpCMFD linear-order correction flux to an arbitrary-order DGFEM basis function, which is implemented and tested on a one-dimensional (1-D) in-house–developed DGFEM-based SN code. The consistency between the lpCMFD accelerated results and the pure SN results is naturally guaranteed by employing upwind current information from DGFEM-based SN transport calculation to evaluate the drift coefficient. It was found from our numerical testing with the CMFD and the lpCMFD acceleration schemes on single-group fixed-source and k-eigenvalue problems that both acceleration schemes can reproduce the unaccelerated scalar flux and keff, respectively. Further numerical testing on a more realistic case is performed on a 1-D slice multi-energy-group problem based on the three-dimensional C5G7 mixed oxide (MOX) benchmark. It was found that by using the function space projector proposed in this paper, lpCMFD was stable and effective to accelerate the DGFEM-based SN neutron transport calculation for all coarse mesh sizes tested while CMFD diverged for large optical thickness.
