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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.
Jeffery Lewins, Capt. RE
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 12 | Number 1 | January 1962 | Pages 10-14
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A25363
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The equations describing a reactor system are sometimes nonlinear and do not admit a solution for the neutron density that is separable into a function of time only and a function of the remaining variables. An appropriate variational principle is given by demanding that the calculation of the observable nature of the reactor is insensitive to the value employed for the density, thus obtaining an equation for the optimum distribution of detectors to measure the observable behavior. This optimum weighting function is not identical with the conventional adjoint function or importance in the nonlinear range but the conventional treatment of linear systems is found to be a special case of our general principle. It is shown that the approximate treatment of nonlinear systems as eigenvalue systems is fundamentally unsound.