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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.
C. B. Ashmore, D. Brown, S. Dickinson, H. E. Sims
Nuclear Technology | Volume 129 | Number 3 | March 2000 | Pages 387-397
Technical Paper | Reactor Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3069
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radiolytic oxidation is considered to be the main mechanism for the formation of I2 from aqueous CsI in the containment of a water-cooled reactor after a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) in a pressurized water reactor. Despite the amount of study over the last 60 yr on the radiation chemistry of iodine, there have, until recently, been few consistent sets of experiments spanning a wide enough range of conditions to allow models to be verified with confidence.The results from a set of experiments carried out to remedy this deficiency are described. In this work the rate of evolution of I2 from sparged irradiated borate solutions containing CsI labeled with 131I was measured on-line over a range of conditions. This work involved the measurement of the effects of pH, temperature, O2 concentration, I- concentration, phosphate concentration, dose-rate, and impurities on the rate of evolution of I2. The range of conditions was chosen to span as closely as possible the range of conditions expected in a LOCA, but also to help to elucidate some of the mechanisms especially at high pH.The pH was found to be a very important factor in determining iodine volatility. Over the temperature range studied, the extent of oxidation decreased with increasing temperature, but this was counteracted, to a greater or lesser extent, by the decrease in partition coefficient. The oxygen concentration was more important in solutions not containing phosphate. The fractional oxidation was not particularly dependent on iodide concentration, but GI2 was very dependent on [I-]. There was no effect of added impurities, Fe, Mn, Mo, or organics although, in separate work, silver was found to have a very important effect.During attempts to interpret the data, it was found that it was necessary to consider the iodine atom as a volatile species with a partition coefficient of 1.9 taken from thermodynamic data. The modeling work is described in a separate paper.
