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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.
Andreas Szeless, Lawrence Ruby
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 45 | Number 1 | July 1971 | Pages 7-13
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A20340
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method has been devised to calculate exactly the probability distribution of reactor neutron noise. The distribution is calculated from a complicated generating function which has been known for some time. The method depends on the success achieved in obtaining a closed-form expression for the n'th derivative of a differentiable r-fold composite function. As an application of the technique, exact probability distributions are calculated for a variety of parameters. The resultant distributions are compared with the approximative negative binomial distribution. In some cases, rather similar variances are found, where the negative binomial is not expected to be a good approximation to the exact distribution. The explanation lies in an interlacing of the exact and approximative distributions. A procedure is described for fitting an experimental distribution to the exact distribution, thereby obtaining the best values of the parameters α1 and Y1 ∞. When the negative binomial is a good approximation to the exact distribution, only the product α1 Y1 ∞ can be obtained by the fitting procedure. In such cases, a Feynman-variance experiment can be performed to determine the parameters separately.
