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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
T. J. Dolan, K. Yamazaki, A. Sagara
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 60-72
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A599
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Physics-Engineering-Cost (PEC) code has been updated to include blanket-shield design data, a new cost structure, new unit costs, and improved algorithms. It is used here to estimate component masses and costs for heliotron reactors, which have continuous helical coils like the Large Helical Device.Relative to a "base case," we study how the cost of electricity (COE) varies with various parameters: central electron temperature, coil width/depth ratio, plasma-coil distance, plasma profile shapes, beta, maximum magnetic field, neutron wall load, net power output, plasma impurity content, plasma aspect ratio, and blanket lifetime.The COE decreases strongly with increasing beta but tends to level out at beta values >6%. At a fixed output power, higher beta values make the reactor smaller, which decreases the energy confinement time, making ignition more difficult. The resulting COE estimates are compared with that of the Stellarator Power Plant Study.