ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
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.
William A. Boyd, Mark W. Fecteau
Nuclear Technology | Volume 104 | Number 2 | November 1993 | Pages 207-218
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Waste Management / Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34884
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) facility is designed to store transuranic waste that will consist mainly of surface contaminate articles and sludge. The fissile material in the waste is predominately 239Pu. The waste is grouped into two categories: contact-handled waste, which will be stored in 55-gal steel drums or in steel boxes, and remote-handled waste, which will be stored in specially designed cylindrical steel canisters. To show that criticality safety will be acceptable, criticality analyses were performed to demonstrate that a large number of containers with limiting loadings of fissile material could be stored at the site and meet a keff limit of 0.95. Criticality analyses based on the classic worst-case moderated plutonium sphere approach would severely limit the capacity for storage of waste at the facility. Therefore, these analyses use realistic or credible worst-case assumptions to better represent the actual storage situation without compromising the margin of safety. Numerous sensitivity studies were performed to determine the importance of various parameters on the criticality of the configuration. It was determined that the plutonium loading has the dominant effect on the system reactivity. Nearly all other reactivity variations from the sensitivity studies were found to be relatively small. The analysis shows that criticality of the contacthandled waste storage drums and boxes and the remotehandled canisters is prevented by restrictions on maximum fissile loading per container and on the size of handling/storage areas. Analysis has shown that the keff limit of 0.95 is met with the storage of large loadings offissile material at the WIPP facility, while credible or realistic assumptions still provide a large degree of conservatism.
