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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.
David P. Weber, Tanju Sofu, Won Sik Yang, Thomas J. Downar, Justin W. Thomas, Zhaopeng Zhong, Jin Young Cho, Kang Seog Kim, Tae Hyun Chun, Han Gyu Joo, Chang Hyo Kim
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 3 | March 2007 | Pages 395-408
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE07-A2672
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Numerical Nuclear Reactor (NNR) was developed to provide a high-fidelity tool for light water reactor analysis based on first-principles models. High fidelity is accomplished by integrating full physics, highly refined solution modules for the coupled neutronic and thermal-hydraulic phenomena. Each solution module employs methods and models that are formulated faithfully to the first principles governing the physics, real geometry, and constituents. Specifically, the critical analysis elements that are incorporated in the coupled code capability are a direct whole-core neutron transport solution and an ultra-fine-mesh computational fluid dynamics / heat transfer solution, each obtained with explicit (sub-fuel-pin-cell level) heterogeneous representations of the components of the core. The considerable computational resources required for such highly refined modeling are addressed by using massively parallel computers, which together with the coupled codes constitute the NNR. To establish confidence in the NNR methodology, verification and validation of the solution modules have been performed and are continuing for both the neutronic module and the thermal-hydraulic module for single-phase and two-phase boiling conditions under prototypical pressurized water reactor and boiling water reactor conditions. This paper describes the features of the NNR and validation of each module and provides the results of several coupled code calculations.