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.
Yunhuang Zhang, Jean C. Ragusa, Jim E. Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 10 | October 2020 | Pages 903-926
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1771141
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Simplified () approximation is often used to model radiation transport phenomena, but it converges to the true solution of the transport equation only in one-dimensional slab geometry. In all other geometries, it incurs a model error that needs to be quantified. In this paper, we estimate the radiation transport model error due to the approximation and employ transport solutions (with high order) as reference transport solutions. Because the solution does not contain the full angular information of the transport solution, an angular intensity must be reconstructed from the solution in order to compute the model error. We propose two such reconstruction schemes. Model error estimates are given for various quantities of interests, i.e., scalar radiation intensity, radiation flux, and boundary leakage. An adjoint-based approach is proposed to evaluate the model error and is compared against forward and residual techniques. Two-dimensional numerical experiments are presented.