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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.
Paul P.H. Wilson, H. Tsige-Tamirat, Hesham Y. Khater, Douglass L. Henderson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 784-788
Fusion Blanket and Shield Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A11963709
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ALARA [Analytic and Laplacian Adaptive Radioactivity Analysis] v1.0,1,2 a new activation code released in January 1998 and developed specifically for the analysis of radioactivity in fusion energy systems, has been validated by comparison to other commonly used activation codes, FISPACT-973 and DKR-Pulsar 2.04 using the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] Fusion Evaluated Nuclear Data Library [FENDL] Calculational Activation Benchmark.5 The solutions to the benchmark problem for both steady-state and pulsed operation have been calculated with all three programs on the same IBM RS/6000 workstation. In addition to comparing the total activity in each of the 44 non-void zones and the isotopic contributions to the activity at specific spatial points, the required computing time has been compared. For the steady state problem, agreement between ALARA and FISPACT-97 for the total activity was within 2.5% in all zones at all cooling times, and within 0.5% in most zones. For both the steady state and pulsed problem, agreement between ALARA and DKR-Pulsar 2.0 was within 1% in all zones and at all cooling times where tritium inventories were not significant. The agreement between ALARA and FISPACT-97 for the individual isotopic inventories in the stainless steel first wall back-plate were within 1% for all dominant isotopes at all cooling times, while the DKR-Pulsar 2.0 results showed some significant discrepancies. The processing time for ALARA is 2/3 of that for DKR-Pulsar 2.0 and less than 1/5 of that for FISPACT-97. This validation exercise proves that ALARA is an accurate and fast computational tool for the calculation of induced activity in fusion power systems.
