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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Dong H. Nguyen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 52 | Number 3 | November 1973 | Pages 292-298
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE73-A19476
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nonlinear analysis has shown that when the buckling of a nuclear reactor with negative feedback is increased, the flux, under appropriate conditions, will proceed to a new asymptotically stable state. This contrasts with the linear theory which predicts a runaway. In this work, the method of “coordinate stretching” has been used to obtain the asymptotic solution of a nonlinear nuclear reactor under the combined effect of an initial positive disturbance and a negative feedback based on the Newton’s law of cooling. The minimum stability condition is derived by requiring that a bounded new equilibrium state exist. This condition sets an upper limit to the magnitude of the initial disturbance beyond which an equilibrium solution does not exist. Furthermore, the magnitude of the equilibrium flux is determined explicitly in terms of several relevant physical properties of the system: feedback coefficient, energy production rate, and rate of energy transfer to coolant.