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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.
Won Sik Yang, Hussein S. Khalil
Nuclear Technology | Volume 135 | Number 2 | August 2001 | Pages 162-182
Technical Paper | Accelerators | doi.org/10.13182/NT135-162
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results of blanket design studies for a lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE)-cooled accelerator transmutation of waste system are presented. These studies focused primarily on achieving two important and somewhat contradictory performance objectives: First, maximizing discharge burnup, so as to minimize the number of successive recycle stages and associated recycle losses, and second, minimizing burnup reactivity loss over an operating cycle, to minimize reduction of source multiplication with burnup. The blanket is assumed to be fueled with a nonuranium metallic dispersion fuel; pyrochemical techniques are used for recycle of residual transuranic (TRU) actinides in this fuel after irradiation. The key system objective of high-discharge burnup is shown to be achievable in a configuration with comparatively high power density and relatively low burnup reactivity loss. System design and operating characteristics that satisfy these goals while meeting key thermal-hydraulic and materials-related design constraints have been preliminarily developed. Results of the performance evaluations indicate that an average discharge burnup of ~27% is achieved with a ~3.5-yr fuel residence time. Reactivity loss over the half-year cycle is 5.3%k. The peak fast fluence value at discharge, the TRU fraction in the charged fuel, and the peak coolant velocity are well within the assumed design limits. Owing to its use of nonuranium fuel, this proposed LBE-cooled system can consume light water reactor-discharge TRUs at the maximum rate achievable per unit of fission energy produced (~1.0 g/MWd).