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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.
B.D. Boyer, J. W. Hartzell,† S. Lider, G. E. Robinson, A. J. Baratta, A. J. Roscioli
Nuclear Technology | Volume 103 | Number 2 | August 1993 | Pages 206-219
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34844
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effects of condensation steam quenching in modeling two-phase flow phenomena during a nuclear reactor transient are studied. The RETRAN-02-MOD002 code, with three field equations and a nonequilibrium pressurizer model option, and the TRAC-BF1 code, with six field equations, predicted plant response to a boiling water reactor plant test of a main steam isolation valve closure without safety relief valve opening. The basic RETRAN-02-MOD002 field equations cannot model steam quenching by condensation. However, by activating the nonequilibrium modeling option of the basic RETRAN-02-MOD002 code and by inputting appropriate interfacial heat transfer coefficients, steam quenching by condensation was calculated. This approach gave results closer to those obtained with the test data. The two TRAC-BFI models used two different methods of tracking water level to approximate the condensation quenching effect. Because the void fraction changes too gradually, the calculation without the TRAC two-phase water level tracking option overquenched the pressure and filled the vessel with too much water. However, because the void fraction changes virtually instantaneously (as it does in the plant), the TRAC two-phase water level tracking option’s prediction of the quenching of the pressure was 50% closer to the data than was any RETRAN-02-MOD002 calculation, and it followed the water level almost as well as the RETRAN-02-MOD002 best-estimate case. Both codes overpredicted the pressure spike.
