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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. Benhamadouche, M.-C. Gauffre, Y. Fournier (EdF)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 636-643
A high fidelity wall-resolved Large Eddy Simulation has been performed for the flow through a guide plate of a Control Rod Guide Assembly (CRGA) at a hydraulic Reynolds number of 10,000. The computational mesh contains more than 1 billion computational cells and the simulation is run over six flow passes, which corresponds to almost 1 million time steps. The pressure forces are computed for all the rods and their average and rms values analyzed. This simulation can be either used to validate coarser LES/URANS computations, to understand the origin of physical phenomena such as deformations and vibrations or to model the pressure load along a rod.
