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Conference Spotlight
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.
Yoshihiko Nagamine, Hideki Nakashima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 35 | Number 1 | January 1999 | Pages 62-70
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A78
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A magnetic thrust chamber concept in a laser fusion rocket is suitable for controlling the plasma flow, and it has an advantage in that thermalization with wall structures in a thrust chamber can be avoided. Rayleigh-Taylor instability would occur at the surface of expanding plasma, and it would lead to the degradation of thrust efficiency, which would result from diffusion of the plasma through an ambient magnetic field. A three-dimensional hybrid particle-in-cell code has been developed to analyze the plasma instability in the magnetic thrust chamber and to estimate the thrust efficiency. It is found that the instability would not have serious effects on the thrust efficiency; thrust efficiency in terms of momentum obtained here amounts to 65%. The effects of varying parameters on the thrust efficiency are also studied. The thrust efficiency seemed to reach its maximum value around c = 50 deg, where c is an angle subtended from the initial plasma position at the z axis to the solenoidal coil and its dependence on magnetic field energy produced by the coil is found to be weak for the cases studied here.