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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.
Eberhard Teuchert, Hans Joachim Rütten, Heinz Werner
Nuclear Technology | Volume 38 | Number 3 | May 1978 | Pages 374-383
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT78-A32035
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the pebble-bed high-temperature reactor, a wide choice is available for the design of the fuel elements and for the reactor fueling scheme. This flexibility has been utilized for the conception of different possibilities for the closure of the thorium fuel cycle. The easiest scheme is mixed-oxide recycling with repeated recycling of 236U. Loading recycle fuel into separate elements without thorium reduces the uranium ore demand by 13%. Entire separation of the feed and breed circuits brings another reduction of 5%. Furthermore, the feed-breed cycle allows the production of 233U for the near-breeder variant. This variant achieves a conversion ratio of 0.97, and it represents a possible choice for efficient protection of uranium ore resources. Within the span of uncertainties in the cost assumptions, fuel cycle costs are found to be comparable for all considered cycles, including the near-breeder.
