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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!
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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.
Jae-Woo Ju, Sang-Moon Lee, Kwang-Yong Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 2 | February 2013 | Pages 274-281
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors/Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15783
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The outlet plenum of a pebble bed modular-type gas-cooled nuclear reactor was optimized using three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes analysis and optimization techniques. A shear stress transport turbulence model was used as a turbulence closure. Two design variables for the optimization were selected: dimensionless displacement on the horizontal line and the angle of rotation about the center of gravity of the roof support block. The objective function was defined as a pressure drop between the inlet and the outlet of the outlet plenum. Latin hypercube sampling was used for selecting experimental design points within the design space. The objective function value was obtained at each design point through numerical analysis. The results show that the optimal design significantly improved the performance of the outlet plenum with respect to pressure drop. Through optimization, the pressure drop decreased by 11.8% compared to the pressure drop under the reference geometry.