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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Steven E. Jones
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 8 | Number 1 | July 1985 | Pages 1511-1521
Muon-Catalyzed Fusion Engineering Review | Proceedings of the Sixth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (San Francisco, California, March 3-7, 1985) | doi.org/10.13182/FST85-A39980
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Negative muons (elementary particles having a mean life of 2.2 microseconds) have been used to induce nuclear fusion reactions of the type: Behaving like a very heavy electron, a muon forms a tightly bound deuteron-triton-muon (dtµ) molecule. Fusion then ensues, typically in picoseconds, as the nuclei tunnel through the Coulomb repulsive barrier. Up to 160 fusions per muon (average) have been observed in cold deuterium-tritium mixtures. Thus, the process may be called muon-catalyzed fusion, or “cold” fusion. The fusion energy thus released is twenty times the total energy of the muon driving the fusion reaction. However, the energy needed to produce the muon catalysts is currently much larger than the fusion energy released. In preparing for muon-catalyzed fusion experiments, a number of engineering challenges were encountered and successfully resolved. Similar challenges would be faced in a (hypothetical) cold fusion reactor. High-temperature plasmas and many associated difficulties are of course circumvented. However, the gaseous d-t fuel must be contained at elevated temperatures (∼400°C) and near-liquid density. (Experiments show that increasing either parameter enhances the fusion yield.) This translates into high gas pressures (∼108Pa) and a new class of engineering challenges. Material strength and fabricability, hydrogen permeation and material embrittlement, tritium inventory and safety concerns, muon beam scattering and degradation, and reaction vessel geometries are among critical engineering considerations.
