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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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.
Nick DeJulia, Trevor Jones (AMS)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1251-1259
A pressurized water reactor (PWR) is equipped with a magnetically coupled positioning system known as a control rod drive mechanism (CRDM). In many cases, the plant system that measures the position of the control rods in the reactor core is the digital rod position indication (DRPI) system. The DRPI system is designed to continuously sense and display the positions of each of the control and shutdown rods. Both of these systems consist of coils above the reactor head, connectors at the reactor head and at the containment penetration, instrumentation and power cabinets, and long runs of interconnecting cables in between these system components. The objective of cable testing is to evaluate the condition of the rod control and position indication coils, connections, cables and to identify any defects or anomalies that may adversely affect their normal operation. Various electrical measurements can provide insight into the health and reliability of these rod control and rod position cable circuits. Some measurements are used to identify configuration anomalies, others test the integrity of connectors and proper isolation from station ground, and some validate the health of the coil to identify resistive connections, insulation degradation, or turn-to-turn shorts. This systematic approach to rod control and rod position coil and cable testing increases system reliability, reduces the likelihood of unplanned outages from dropped rods, and reduces outage times and maintenance costs which in turn reduces costs for the electrical utility.