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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.
K. Lisa Reed, Farzad Rahnema, Dingkang Zhang, Dan Ilas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1686-1697
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1757962
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, a set of stylized numerical benchmark problems is developed. These problems are based on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory preconceptual design of a fluoride-salt-cooled small modular advanced high-temperature reactor, or SmAHTR, that uses prismatic fuel assemblies with cylindrical pins/rods containing tri-isotropic fuel particles. A detailed description of the benchmark problems is achieved by closing several outstanding design gaps and modifying the coolant channel shape to reduce bypass flow for improved coolant and fuel temperature distributions. The benchmark problems, while stylized, retain the important thermal-hydraulic and reactor physics features (e.g., fuel particles) necessary for benchmarking tools for reactor core analysis.
In addition to the full description, detailed reference results such as the eigenvalue (keff) and fuel pin and assembly-averaged fission density distributions are provided for five benchmark problems: full-length fuel assemblies with control rods fully withdrawn and inserted, and full core with all control rods withdrawn, all control rods fully inserted, and some control rods fully inserted (near-critical core). The provided results are calculated using the continuous-energy Monte Carlo code MCNP.