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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.
Masabumi Nishikawa, Ken-Ichi Tanaka, Mitsuru Uetake, Tomofumi Shiraishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 234-240
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A67
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The tritium bred in a deuterium-tritium fusion reactor is removed from its blanket by using helium sweep gas mixed with some amount of hydrogen to promote the release rate. From the viewpoint of uptake capacity at the partial pressure of tritium and ease of tritium transfer to the main fuel cycle, a cryosorption bed, which uses molecular sieves or activated carbon at the liquid nitrogen temperature, is attractive for recovery of bred tritium in the blanket sweep gas. The cryosorption bed is also applicable as a transfer pump of tritium in the fuel-handling process. Tritium cryosorbed from a certain subunit of the fuel-handling system is transferred to other subunits by an increase in temperature and the operation of valves. It is necessary to know the adsorption isotherm and the mass transfer coefficient of each hydrogen isotope for estimation of breakthrough performances of tritium in a cryosorption bed because the mixture of tritium with other hydrogen isotopes must be treated. It is observed that the isotope effects in adsorption capacity and surface diffusivity have a close connection with the quantum effect that is represented by the reduced molecular weight. The correlative equation between Langmuir constants in the adsorption isotherm with reduced molecular weight of hydrogen isotopes is proposed. The correlative equation between surface diffusivity and reduced molecular weight is also presented.