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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.
Zhi-Gang Zhang, Ken-Ichiro Sugiyama
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 3 | September 2011 | Pages 619-627
Technical Paper | NURETH-13 Special / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12510
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To characterize the relationship between hydrodynamic and thermal effects on fragmentation of molten core structural material, which mainly includes cladding material, with the interaction of the coolant of sodium under a wide range of thermal and hydrodynamic conditions, this paper focuses on a series of fragmentation characteristics of a single molten Type 304 stainless steel droplet (5 g) with an ambient Weber number Wea from 199 to 586 and superheat conditions from 23 to 276°C, which penetrates into a sodium pool at an initial temperature from 301 to 313°C.In our experiments, fine fragmentations of single molten stainless steel droplets with high Wea were clearly observed, even under a supercooled condition that is well below its melting point of 1427°C. The dimensionless mass median diameters (Dm/D0) of molten droplets with high Wea are less than molten droplets with low Wea under the same thermal condition. When Wea is approximately >250, the hydrodynamic effect on fragmentation becomes predominant over the thermal effect under a relatively low superheat condition. For a higher Wea range, the comparisons indicate that the fragment sizes of the molten stainless steel droplet and jet have similar distributions to those of molten metallic fuel jets even with different thermophysical properties and a thousandfold mass difference, which implies the possibility that the fragment size characteristics of molten metal jets could be evaluated by the interaction of a single droplet with the sodium coolant without the consideration of dropping modes and mass.
