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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Empowering the next generation: ANS’s newest book focuses on careers in nuclear energy
A new career guide for the nuclear energy industry is now available: The Nuclear Empowered Workforce by Earnestine Johnson. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience across 16 nuclear facilities, Johnson offers a practical, insightful look into some of the many career paths available in commercial nuclear power. To mark the release, Johnson sat down with Nuclear News for a wide-ranging conversation about her career, her motivation for writing the book, and her advice for the next generation of nuclear professionals.
When Johnson began her career at engineering services company Stone & Webster, she entered a field still reeling from the effects of the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, nearly 15 years earlier. Her hiring cohort was the first group of new engineering graduates the company had brought on since TMI, a reflection of the industry-wide pause in nuclear construction. Her first long-term assignment—at the Millstone site in Waterford, Conn., helping resolve design issues stemming from TMI—marked the beginning of a long and varied career that spanned positions across the country.
Blair M. Smith, Samim Anghaie
Nuclear Technology | Volume 145 | Number 3 | March 2004 | Pages 311-318
Technical Note | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3480
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The U.S. Department of Energy initiative Generation IV aim is to produce an entire nuclear energy production system with next-generation features for certification before 2030. A Generation IV-capable system must have superior sustainability, safety and reliability, and economic cost advantages in comparison with third generation light water reactors (LWRs). A gas core reactor (GCR) with magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) power converter and cascading power cycle forms the basis for a Generation IV concept that is expected to set the upper performance limits in sustainability and power conversion efficiency among all existing and proposed fission powered systems. A gaseous core reactor delivering thousands of megawatt fission power acts as the heat source for a high-temperature MHD power converter. A uranium tetrafluoride fuel mix, with ~95% mol fraction helium gas, provides a stable working fluid for the primary MHD Brayton cycle. The hot working fluid exiting a topping cycle MHD generator has sufficient heat to drive a conventional helium Brayton cycle with 35% thermal efficiency as well as a superheated steam Rankine cycle, with up to 40% efficiency, which recovers the waste heat from the intermediate Brayton cycle. A combined cycle efficiency of close to 70% can be achieved with only a modest MHD topping cycle efficiency. The high-temperature direct-energy conversion capability of an MHD dynamo combined with an already sophisticated steam-powered turbine industry knowledge base allows the cascading cycle design to achieve breakthrough first-law energy efficiencies previously unheard of in the nuclear power industry. Although simple in concept, the gas core reactor design has not achieved the state of technological maturity that established high-temperature gas-cooled reactors and high-temperature molten salt core reactors have pioneered. However, the GCR-MHD concept has considerable promise; for example, like molten salt reactors the fuel is continuously cycled, allowing high burnup, continuous burning of actinides, and hence greatly improved fuel utilization. The fuel inventory is two orders of magnitude lower than LWRs of comparable power output, and fissile plutonium production is likewise lower than in spent LWR fuel. Besides these features, specific GCR-MHD design challenges such as fission enhanced gas conductivity of the MHD partially ionized gas, GCR safety issues and related engineering problems are discussed.
