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Conference Spotlight
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.
Joseph W. Nielsen, David W. Nigg, Daren R. Norman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 3 | March 2018 | Pages 228-246
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1356647
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute is currently in the process of qualifying a low-enriched-uranium fuel element design for the new Ki-Jang Research Reactor (KJRR). As part of this effort, a prototype KJRR fuel element was irradiated for several operating cycles in the northeast flux trap of the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at the Idaho National Laboratory. The KJRR fuel element contained a very large quantity of fissile material (618 g 235U) in comparison with historical ATR experiment standards (<1 g 235U), and its presence in the ATR flux trap was expected to create a neutronic configuration that would be well outside of the approved validation envelope for the reactor physics analysis methods used to support ATR operations.
Accordingly, it was necessary to conduct an extensive set of new low-power physics measurements in the ATR Critical Facility (ATRC), a companion facility to the ATR, located in an immediately adjacent building and sharing the same fuel storage canal. The new measurements included fission power distributions, reactivity, and measurements related to the calibration of the in-core online instrumentation. The effort was focused on the objective of expanding the validation envelope for the computational reactor physics tools used to support ATR operations and safety analysis to include the planned KJRR irradiation in the ATR and similar experiments that are anticipated in the future.
The computational and experimental results have demonstrated that the neutronic behavior of the KJRR fuel element in the ATRC is well understood in terms of its general effects on ATRC core reactivity and fission power distributions and its effects on the calibration of the ATR Lobe Power Calculation and Indication System, as well as in terms of its own internal fission rate distribution and total fission power per unit ATRC core power. Taken as a whole, these results have significantly extended the ATR physics validation envelope, thereby enabling an entire new class of irradiation experiments.
