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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.
F. S. Becker, K. L. Kompa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 58 | Number 2 | August 1982 | Pages 329-353
Technical Note | Radioisotopes and Isotope | doi.org/10.13182/NT82-A32941
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Today, the most actively pursued uranium laser isotope separation methods work with uranium vapor, organic uranium compounds, or uranium hexafluoride. The atomic vapor process has reached the highest development level, but its commercial realization is facing severe obstacles due to the aggressivity of the uranium vapor and the low working pressure. For a commercial separation plant, UF6 would be the most attractive process gas. A promising approach to overcome the problems caused by the small UF6 isotope shift seems to be the use of two infrared wavelengths in the 16- and 9-μm range. Currently, only the CO2 laser pumped CF4 laser and the stimulated rotational Raman scattering of CO2 laser radiation in para-hydrogen are able to provide the energies required for the selective 16-μm excitation, with the Raman method offering better prospects with regard to scalability and frequency tuning. The state-of-the-art of both of these lasers is not advanced enough for a commercial separation plant, where a narrowing of the complex UF6 spectrum by means of a supersonic beam is probably indispensable. Their development level, however, is sufficient to carry through the experiments necessary to clarify the still unanswered questions, i.e., to what extent and with what yield the absorption differences of the two isotopic UF6 species can be transformed into a selective dissociation.