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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.
S. L. Sharma, J. R. Buchanan, M. A. Lopez de Bertodano
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 8 | August-September 2020 | Pages 665-675
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1744406
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thermally induced density wave instability (DWI) (Type-II) is an important phenomenon for two-phase flow industrial systems. Developing numerical tools and methods for the prediction of the DWI boundary is of importance in the design and safety of nuclear reactors. With the advent of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in nuclear safety analysis, it is important to first verify the CFD results against existing theory and validate them with experimental data. In this work, a CFD two-fluid model (TFM) for DWI was implemented and verified against the theory of Ishii (1971). Closure relations were selected to approach the homogeneous equilibrium flow model. A steady-state verification of the model was carried out first. Then, dynamic verification was performed. Predictions of the stability boundary and the frequency of oscillations are in a good agreement with the theory. This study further verifies the dynamic capability of TFM CFD.