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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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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.
Ronald R. Winget
Nuclear Technology | Volume 85 | Number 1 | April 1989 | Pages 7-11
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT89-A34222
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Based on personal and industrial experiences, Point Beach Nuclear Plant personnel have developed a secondary in-service inspection program to detect and quantify significant service-related degradation and preexisting conditions in piping systems that could jeopardize the integrity of those systems in the future. The underlying objective of the program is to look at piping components whose failure could result in significant personnel or equipment damage. The primary concern is to locate areas of severe erosion-corrosion in carbon steel piping prior to the occurrence of a leak or catastrophic rupture. In addition, certain welds are examined to locate areas of significant fatigue damage demonstrated by service-related flaw extension or crack growth. Using an internally developed computer model called the Badness Factor Program, plant personnel rank components as to their susceptibility to erosion-corrosion and stress-induced fatigue. It uses hydrodynamic variables to assign a factor to each component and fitting so a comparison of the relative magnitudes of this factor can be made for a given system or piping section. A qualitative decision is then made as to where the most likely location is for degradation.