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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.
Christophe Demazière, Christian Marcel, Martin Rohde, Tim van der Hagen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 158 | Number 2 | February 2008 | Pages 164-193
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-A2745
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, two-phase-flow oscillations at the natural-circulation CIRCUS test facility are investigated in a two-riser configuration. These oscillations are driven by flashing (and to some extent by geysering). For a given range of operating conditions of the facility, the oscillations exhibit erratic behavior. This study demonstrates that this behavior can be attributed to deterministic chaos. This is proven by performing a continuous wavelet transform of the measured time series. Any hidden self-similarity in the measurement is seen in the corresponding scale-space plane. The novelty of the present investigation lies with the multifractal approach used for characterizing the chaos. Both nonlinear time series analysis and wavelet-based analysis methods show that the dynamics of the flow oscillations has a multifractal structure. For the former, both Higuchi's method and detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) were used, whereas for the latter, the wavelet-transform modulus-maxima method was used. The strange attractor corresponding to the dynamics of the system can thus be described as a set of interwoven monofractal objects. The global singular properties of the measured time series is then fully characterized by a spectrum of singularities f(), which is the Hausdorff dimension of the set of points where the multifractal object has singularities of strength (or Hölder exponents of) . Whereas Higuchi's method and DFA allow easily determining whether the deterministic chaos has a monofractal or multifractal hierarchy, the wavelet-transform modulus-maxima has the advantage of giving a quantitative estimation of the fractal spectrum. The time-modeling of such behavior of the facility is therefore difficult since there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions. From a regulatory point of view, such behavior of natural-circulation systems in a multiple-riser configuration has thus to be avoided.