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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.
Andrea Bucalossi, Alessandro Petruzzi, Marian Kristof, Francesco D'Auria
Nuclear Technology | Volume 172 | Number 1 | October 2010 | Pages 29-47
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT172-29
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Computational reactor safety analysis is trending to replace conservative evaluation model calculations with best-estimate analysis complemented by uncertainty evaluation of the code results. In such cases, the evaluation of the margin to acceptance criteria (e.g., the maximum fuel rod clad temperature) is based on the upper limit of the calculated uncertainty range. Uncertainty analysis is compulsory if relevant conclusions are to be obtained from best-estimate thermal-hydraulic code calculations in order to avoid presenting single values of unknown accuracy for comparison with regulatory acceptance limits.This paper, after a thorough introduction of conservative and best-estimate methods and characterization of the main sources of uncertainties affecting best-estimate system codes, applies a best-estimate-plus-uncertainty (BEPU) method to three cases having as reference different nuclear power plants and different types of transients. Finally, the results from the BEPU approach is compared with a conservative approach and a combined approach.
