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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.
Kwang-Il Ahn, Young-Ho Jin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 116 | Number 2 | November 1996 | Pages 146-159
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35296
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a probabilistic safety assessment for nuclear power plants, an important issue is the treatment and quantification of the uncertainties involved in each step of the system safety or accident analysis. There are two main types of uncertainties that should be explicitly considered in the analysis, i.e., parameter uncertainties contained in the model describing the behavior of real systems or accidents, and modeling uncertainties due to the imperfect description of the model itself. The latter case indicates a representation of imprecision in the analyst’s knowledge about models or their predictions. Although the field of uncertainty analysis has progressed to the point that several studies have been carried out that maintain a distinction between parameter and model uncertainty, in recent times, the model uncertainty analysis has indeed been less complete than that of the former type. However, there are important advantages to explicit consideration of the modeling uncertainty in risk analysis. The most important advantage is that it mitigates the overconfidence that can occur when a single model is used to make predictions since uncertainty bounds tend to be more realistic when a range of plausible models is considered. The second advantage is that it facilitates scientific communication because scientifically defensible analyses that explicitly incorporate a range of models obviate the problem of arguing over whose model is correct. The third advantage is the enhancement of credibility in the predictions or final outcomes. For these reasons, the modeling uncertainty should be incorporated into the current context of uncertainty analysis. A formal approach on the expression of highly uncertain models and its assessment within a probabilistic framework are provided. The basic idea of the current procedure is that the quantification of modeling uncertainties can be made by combining all the uncertainties assigned to alternative models into a probability distribution (or a family of probability distributions) about a particular result of interest, conditional on all the modeling assumptions that have been made in the analysis.