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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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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.
David R. Desaulniers (NRC)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1769-1777
The human factors engineering (HFE) validation of a nuclear power plant control room design, or of a design modification (e.g., for modernization), is a complex undertaking that faces many technical and logistical challenges. These challenges include conducting validations that address the diversity of operating conditions, staffing configurations, and failure scenarios that the plant will experience, or must be designed to tolerate. Such challenges must be addressed within the practical constraints of available resources (e.g., test personnel, participants, testbeds, and time). How these challenges are addressed can impact the confidence that vendors, nuclear plant operating companies, and regulatory authorities have in validation results and conclusions. Since 2013, the Nuclear Energy Agency’s Working Group on Human and Organizational Factors has been working with industry experts in control room validation to identify and advance the development of methods for enhancing confidence in control room validations. The most recent product of these efforts is a working group report that describes a general approach and rationale for validating systems through a series of successive, coordinated validation activities. The working group refers to this approach as, multi-stage validation (MSV). This paper summarizes the central concepts and issues discussed in the working group report, including the defining characteristics of MSV and those that characterize an effective MSV implementation. Also addressed in this paper are methods and issues important to MSV implementation and its further development as an approach to the HFE validation of nuclear power plant control room designs and modifications.
