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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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Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
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.
Parthasarathi Das, Rita Paikaray, Subrata Samantaray, Bipin Kumar Sethy, Amulya Kumar Sanyasi, Joydeep Ghosh
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 56-65
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1938906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The pulsed washer gun–generated plasma released into an evacuated chamber has been diagnosed using the spectroscopic technique. By analyzing the recorded spectral lines of argon plasma, the electron temperature is determined using the spectral line ratios of the Ar ion and Ar atom following the Corona model. The light is collected using an optical fiber placed at a glass port of the chamber and fed into a digital spectrometer to obtain the emitted spectra from plasma in front of the plasma gun mouth. As the plasma diffuses after ejecting out into the evacuated chamber from the plasma gun, the Corona model is an appropriate model for the electron temperature estimation. Large differences in estimated electron temperatures are observed when the Boltzmann plot method, assuming the local thermal equilibrium model for the atomic and ionic lines separately, is used. To study the effect of base pressure in the evacuated chamber on the electron temperature of the plasma ejecting out of the gun, the electron temperature with different base pressures ranging from 20 to 100 Pa is measured and analyzed.