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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.
Guillaume Giudicelli, Kord Smith, Benoit Forget
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1044-1055
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1765606
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A recent hybrid stochastic-deterministic calculation scheme using Monte Carlo–tallied group cross sections in a deterministic solver uses the best of both worlds for accurate and fast reactor agnostic transport simulations. However, neglecting the angular dependence of group cross sections induces large self-shielding errors in resonance groups, causing a large reactivity bias up to 300 pcm in light water reactors. To recover this error, we introduce a two-scale assembly transport calculation scheme: cross sections are tallied at the assembly level, while equivalence parameters are computed in a two-dimensional (2-D) pin cell system. We validate a novel equivalence method based on jump conditions on angular fluxes by comparing to the well-established superhomogenization method for 2-D and three-dimensional (3-D) linear source method of characteristics calculations. Test cases include 2-D and 3-D assemblies of two different enrichments with homogeneous and discretized cross-section discretizations. The linear source approximation enables using coarse source-region discretization for these hot zero-power problems. Both equivalence techniques perform similarly, recover the reactivity bias, and achieve near preservation of reaction rates, supporting this multiscale approach to equivalence.