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Conference Spotlight
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.
Richard D. Schauss
Nuclear Technology | Volume 87 | Number 2 | October 1989 | Pages 498-503
Technical Paper | TMI-2: Health Physics and Environmental Release / Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT89-A27743
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
When the Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident occurred, personnel were dispatched to the site from all over the world to render assistance. The large influx of people (on the order of several thousand persons) placed a tremendous burden on the plant operators’ radiation exposure management (REM) system, which was not designed, or staffed, to handle the volume of transactions that was being generated. Also, due in part to the increased volume, but to an even greater extent the unique characteristics of the accident situation from a radiological and logistics perspective, there were many new, previously unanticipated, health physics information management needs and requirements being generated on a continual basis. This situation precipitated literally hundreds of requests for REM system changes. Many of the requested changes were very extensive and complex in terms of overall logistics and information flow and would have been expensive to implement under the current design. It soon became apparent that the best approach would be to completely redesign the existing REM system to meet the special requirements imposed by the accident situation. The decision was made to design and develop a totally new REM computer system that employed “on-line” transaction processing concepts being used in other industries such as banking and retail. The major problems and decisions that influenced the design and development of GPU Nuclear Corporation’s current on-line computerized REM system (REM on-line) are discussed.
