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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.
P. C. Skelton, J. W. Lane, T. L. George, S. W. Claybrook
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 49-69
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1870862
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Post Fukushima the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued an Order on Spent Fuel Instrumentation (EA-12-051) requiring all U.S. nuclear plants to install spent fuel pool (SFP) water level monitoring instrumentation and ensure the instrument would remain functional following a safe shutdown earthquake (SSE). The structural integrity analysis requires an assessment of the hydrodynamic loads and wave impact forces that the instrument is subjected to during an SSE. Modeling and simulation of the SFP response to an SSE can provide this type of information if the simulation tool is able to capture the important physical phenomena, such as seismic acceleration, surface wave formation, fluid velocities, and multidimensional effects. This paper describes the capabilities of GOTHICTM that can be used to simulate the sloshing surface waves and subsurface fluid motion of an SFP in response to an earthquake.
GOTHIC is a versatile, general-purpose, thermal-hydraulic software package for multiphase flow that is a hybrid between traditional system thermal-hydraulic and computational fluid dynamics codes. It includes a transient, variable body force capability to simulate multi-axis acceleration, and is therefore applicable to seismic events; movement experienced on ships, airplanes, or spacecraft; and other events with system acceleration. Also, since the gravitational constant can be adjusted, GOTHIC can model systems placed outside the Earth’s atmosphere (e.g., spacecraft, space station, the Moon, or other extraterrestrial bodies). The variable body force capability makes GOTHIC well suited to model the hydrodynamic response of an SFP to a seismic event.
This paper describes the governing equations that are solved by GOTHIC as they pertain to accelerating systems. A series of benchmarks covering a range of experiments for surface wave dynamics, acceleration-induced motion, and other important phenomena are presented to demonstrate the verification and validation of GOTHIC for these types of applications. Finally, results from a sample application of GOTHIC for SFP hydrodynamic response are presented that provide the necessary inputs for a structural integrity analysis.
