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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.
Thomas A. Ulrich, Ronald L. Boring (INL), Roger Lew (Univ of Idaho)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1179-1188
To both maintain safety of nuclear plants and bolster economic competitiveness, it is crucial to understand how to optimize the control and monitoring tasks that nuclear operators perform in the main control room. The concept of a computerized operator support system (COSS) that monitors the plant, performs prognostic analysis to detect anomalies, and then alerts the operator to those anomalies, is one approach that provides promise for bolstering performance and ultimately allowing the operator to keep the plant running for maximum efficiency. The COSS concept leverages a number of technologies to realize these potential performance benefits including computer-based procedures (CBPs), prognostic algorithms, and the displays to convey the system states. The displays for a COSS are the focus of this paper. A prototype tool for building overview screens was developed and evaluated to advance COSS capabilities beyond static displays. The tool is called the Graphical Augmentation Interface for Yoked Overviews (GAIYO, after the Japanese word for “overview”), and is built on the Advanced Nuclear Interface Modeling Environment (ANIME) framework. ANIME-GAIYO automatically generates overview screens that are linked to the CBP system, a type of task based display that tracks the current procedure step and aggregates the information from disparate board controls required for that procedure step into one convenient and easily monitored location. The CBP system dynamically updates the indicators presented for each step such that the operators can reliably reference it to quickly ascertain the plant status. It is purely informative and does not feature controls. Therefore, it represents a technology that could be more readily adopted than the full-fledged COSS concept, which would require a significant regulatory approval process. The evaluation is ongoing, but initial results suggest the tool is advantageous as an operator aid. In particular, the tool provides a strong benefit to allow operators to quickly identify the state of the plant for the current procedure step and then drill down into the control boards with good situation awareness to verify the state based on their initial estimate. Ultimately, this tool provides additional evidence for pursuing the COSS concept and realizing the benefits of a system on operator performance.
