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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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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.
Fred Holzer, Marshall F. Crouch
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 6 | Number 6 | December 1959 | Pages 545-553
doi.org/10.13182/NSE59-A15517
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effects of leakage, detector and source perturbation, and the presence of higher modes in the neutron density distribution on a determination of the mean lifetime of thermal neutrons in water are discussed. The methods used in several recent experiments to minimize these sources of error are analyzed, with particular attention paid to the problem of suppressing the higher modes of the neutron density distribution. The effect of moderator dimensions is presented in terms of mode suppression factors for three characteristic moderator sizes. Finally, the mathematical analysis for a proposed large-geometry, high precision mean lifetime experiment is presented, in which the neutron distribution is calculated as a solution to an eigenvalue problem with variable boundary conditions. Three approximations are presented which allow the counter perturbation to be calculated and the mode content controlled.
