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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
L. Bromberg, H. Hashizume, S. Ito, J. V. Minervini, N. Yanagi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 635-642
Alternate Concepts & Magnets | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12455
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since the discovery of high temperature superconductors (HTS) more than 2 decades ago, there has been interest in their use for future fusion machines. Lack of performance of commercially available materials, however, dampened the initial optimism. However, recent advances in HTS materials, mostly second-generation tapes, open attractive topologies. In addition to reduced cryogenic loads and increased superconducting stability, the HTS tapes may allow demountable magnets that could be very helpful in the long term (for reactor maintenance) and in the intermediate term, for component-testing machines which require large access. Tests on joints have demonstrated that the thermal load due to the Joule dissipation in these joints is small, allowing operation with very long pulses without restrictions on cost of electricity or power availability.There are challenges in the use of HTS in magnets in general, and fusion specifically. The excellent properties of HTS materials, e.g., YBCO (YBa2Cu3O7-) superconductors operating at elevated temperatures (> 30K) also offer operational advantages for fusion machines, but there are challenges, such as the manufacturing of high current cables and methods of quench protection.In addition to tapes, HTS can be fabricated as monoliths. These monoliths offer the possibility of field control for complex geometries, such as generating stellarator-like fields from simple toroidal fields.This paper summarizes work at MIT and in Japan on concept development and testing, as well as challenges ahead.
