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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.
Yukio Sakamoto, Shun-ichi Tanaka, Yoshiko Harima
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 100 | Number 1 | September 1988 | Pages 33-42
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A29012
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The values of buildup factors for a specific energy above K edges and penetration distance vary smoothly with respect to atomic number. An interpolation of buildup factors for an arbitrary elemental material is examined using geometric-progression (G-P) parameters for an equivalent atomic number. The G-P parameters are data fitted to the proposed American National Standard buildup factor data compilation of 17 elements from beryllium to molybdenum and are calculated by the moments method. The data for iron, molybdenum, tin, lanthanum, gadolinium, tungsten, lead, and uranium, including bremsstrahlung and fluorescence, are calculated by the PALLAS code. Various tests over a wide range of atomic numbers confirm that values of the buildup factors generated by interpolated G-P parameters can reproduce the basic data calculated directly over the full range of energy with an accuracy within a few percent. The values of equivalent atomic number for mixture materials, such as water, air, concrete, and lead glass of 4.36 density, are determined from a ratio of scattering cross section to the total attenuation coefficient. The buildup factors for these materials calculated using the G-P parameters, interpolated by the equivalent atomic number, are in good agreement with the basic data, although a deviation is observed above 3 MeV for the buildup factors for lead glass.