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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Latest News
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.
Sen-I Chang, T. W. Kerlin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 13 | Number 3 | March 1972 | Pages 241-249
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT72-A31078
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A systematic design procedure was developed to aid in the reduction of trial and error in the design of reactor control systems. The method developed here uses an automatic optimization to help the designer find the best controller structure and the best controller settings to use in a control system based on conventional controllers (derivative, proportional, or integral). The method was demonstrated in a control system design for a molten salt breeder reactor. The application of the method gave excellent results at only a modest expense in computer time (5 min on the IBM-360 Model 91). The method appears suitable for routine application in reactor control system design.
