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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.
W. Baer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 10 | Number 1 | May 1961 | Pages 57-60
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE61-A25930
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A measurement of the epithermal radiative capture in U238 has been carried out in a natural UO2-fueled blanket cluster of the nuclear mock-up of PWR Core 1. Analysis indicates that a substantial increase (∼20%) in epithermal captures in a natural uranium metal plate fuel cluster should occur in the fuel elements adjacent to a wide intercluster water channel. The experiment shows that the captures in a cylindrical UO2 fuel element at the edge of the bundle is only 7% greater than in a neighboring fuel element. However, the radial distribution of captures in the first fuel rod shows that the captures near the wide intercluster water channel are 65% greater than at an equivalent position on the side of the rod away from the water channel. Calculations of the relative epithermal U238 captures in the cluster have shown that diffusion theory predicts the spatial dependence of the captures in the interior of the cluster but fails near the edge of the bundle. Monte Carlo analysis confirms the observed increase in the captures in a fuel rod at the edge of the bundle, although the precision of the analysis does not make a quantitative comparison feasible.
