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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.
Peter S. Ebey, James K. Hoffer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 35 | Number 2 | March 1999 | Pages 250-254
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A11963932
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Following the successful pressure loading with DT of a thin-walled plastic inertial fusion target shell (such as those designed for use at the OMEGA facility at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (UR/LLE)), continual care must be taken to safeguard the shell from being exposed to unacceptable pressure differentials across its wall. In particular, once the DT has been condensed into a liquid or solid phase and the outside pressure has been reduced, the target must be maintained below some upper cutoff temperature such that the vapor pressure of the DT is below the bursting pressure for the shell. Through the process of β-decay the DT self-heats, but while the shell is in a high vacuum environment (P << 0.8 Pa (6 mtorr) for the OMEGA layering sphere) there is only a negligible heat loss mechanism. This will cause the temperature to increase. A calculation has been done to estimate the rate of temperature increase of the loaded target under high vacuum conditions. A functional form for calculating the target's temperature increase given its starting temperature is presented. An overall result is that under high vacuum conditions the DT changes from a solid at 10 K to a liquid at 37 K (Tc=39.4 K) in about 19 minutes. This “holding time” is significantly less if the initial temperature is higher, the initial state is liquid, or the upper allowed temperature is lower. Simplifying assumptions which were made and their impact on interpreting the results of this calculation are discussed.