ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
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.
P. Deng, B. K. Jeon, H. Park, W. S. Yang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1310-1338
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1621617
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For accurate assessment of nuclear heating in fast reactors, a new coupled neutron and gamma heating calculation scheme has been developed based on VARIANT nodal transport solutions of neutron and gamma flux distributions. The MC2-3 code was extended to generate multigroup neutron and gamma cross sections and kinetic energy release in materials (KERMA) factors, and a utility program CURVE was developed to reconstruct detailed pin and duct wall powers from VARIANT output files. The improved heating calculation scheme has been verified against MCNP6 Monte Carlo reference solutions for the Advanced Burner Test Reactor (ABTR) and Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) benchmark problems. Compared to the existing coupled heating calculation method based on DIF3D diffusion theory solutions, the new heating calculation scheme utilizes more accurate gamma cross sections and KERMA factors, accounts for the transport effects, and eliminates the approximations in the existing pin power reconstruction scheme. As a result, it produces more accurate assembly and pin power distributions. For both the ABTR and EBR-II problems, the maximum assembly power error was ~1% in fuel assemblies and ~2% in instrumented structure assemblies, and the maximum error in pin segment powers in an axial node of fuel assembly was ~4%. In the blankets of the EBR-II problem, the maximum error in pin segment powers was increased to ~8%, mainly due to the lower power level and the relatively large error in the nodal power of the VARIANT solution.
