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Conference Spotlight
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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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.
Oliviero Barana, Adriano Luchetta, Cesare Taliercio
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 972-976
Plasma Engineering | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9036
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The current RFX-mod machine control system relies upon proprietary products for control (PLCs) and supervision (SCADA). To improve the software versatility and to overcome increasing difficulties with legacy products, a major overhaul is being implemented. The new architecture retains the modularity of the current one, but Javais used to program most of the control tasks and the graphical user interfaces, moving the control functions to a new PC-based layer. The physical layer of the communication employs Industrial Ethernet technology for the local area network; data exchange is based on TCP/IP and OPC communication protocols, and on MDS plus technology. The master scheduler talks to non-PLC subsystems using TCP/IP and exchanges data with the tasks on the PLCs through the MDS plus transport layer and OPC. One Windows PC hosts the OPC and MDS plus servers; other PCs execute the control functions and provide the graphical user interface.This paper describes and analyses the current architecture of the RFX-mod machine control system and the renewed one, which is under development. The first encouraging tests, concerning mainly the communication performance, are reported.
