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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.
Bingjing Su, G. C. Pomraning
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 124 | Number 2 | October 1996 | Pages 309-319
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A28580
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Standard PN theory is well developed as an approximation to the neutron transport equation. However, this theory contains no physics in the sense that it simply represents the angular flux as a sum of polynomials in angle. Thus, standard PN theory (with N finite) cannot qualitatively predict correct asymptotic transport behavior except in the limit of pure scattering. In this paper‚ we modify standard PN theory by incorporating certain transport physics, namely, the Case discrete modes, into a modified PN expansion of the angular flux. The theory resulting from using this modified PN-like expansion predicts the exact transport asymptotic growth/decay length, since it contains the discrete Case eigenvalue. Such modified P3-like equations and associated boundary conditions are derived in planar geometry according to a recently introduced variational calculus. Analyses and numerical calculations reveal that this modified P3-like theory possesses the following features: (a) It reduces to standard P3 theory in the limit of pure scattering; (b) it conserves neutrons but exhibits a scalar flux discontinuity at a material interface; (c) it is shown numerically to be exceedingly accurate, much more accurate than standard P3 theory, in predicting various transport theory behavior for homogeneous problems; and (d) for heterogeneous problems, it is necessary that each material region in the system be sufficiently large for this theory to predict better results than standard P3 theory.
