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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.
G. Montet, G. Hennig, A. Kurs
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 1 | Number 1 | March 1956 | Pages 33-52
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE56-A17656
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The distribution of displaced carbon atoms in irradiated graphite has been studied with a radioactive tracer technique. Radiation-damaged graphite containing radioactive displaced carbon (C11) atoms was prepared by cyclotron or betatron irradiation. After partial annealing, the distribution of the C11 was determined by controlled oxidation and counting of CO2 gas samples. Experiments on various types of weakly irradiated graphite indicate that a very small fraction of the displaced atoms are driven to particle surfaces during the annealing process, the fraction being higher for natural graphite than for artificial graphite and varying inversely with graphite particle size. Experimental conditions were varied to determine their effects on the distribution of the disaplaced atoms. Data obtained indicate that very little reintegration of displaced atoms occurs during short neutron bombardments at room temperature, that about 80% of the atoms reintegrate into vacancies during annealing below 400°C and that the remainder coalesce into complexes, and that large scale motion of the complexes begins at 400°C and ceases at approximately 1000°C. At this latter temperature the complexes appear to reach their final positions; however, they are relatively loosely bound and integrate progressively at these sites until they become indistinguishable from lattice atoms near 1700°C. Vacancies resulting from prior irradiation were found by tracer experiments to be effective traps for displaced atoms so that, during annealing of subsequent damage, the fraction that reaches the particle surfaces decreases rapidly with bombardment.