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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Hiroaki Suzuki, Masanori Naitoh, Atsuo Takahashi, Marco Pellegrini, Hidetoshi Okada
Nuclear Technology | Volume 186 | Number 2 | May 2014 | Pages 255-262
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-42
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, mark the start of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Progression of the accident has been analyzed with the SAMPSON code. SAMPSON was originally designed as a large-scale simulation system with the maximum use of mechanistic models and theoretically based equations. In the progression analysis done for Unit 2, SAMPSON could reproduce the pressure transient of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) reasonably well by assuming partial load operation of the reactor core isolation cooling system (RCIC). The pressure transient of the primary containment vessel was reproduced reasonably well by assuming torus room flooding. After the RCIC trip and manual opening of the steam relief valve, SAMPSON predicted the damage to the upper part of the fuel assemblies near the core center and RPV failure due to creep rupture. More than 91 wt% of the core debris relocated to the lower plenum was as particles, and the major constituents were UO2, Zr, and ZrO2 by SAMPSON analysis.
