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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.
Gokhan Yesilyurt, William R. Martin, Forrest B. Brown
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 171 | Number 3 | July 2012 | Pages 239-257
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-67
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the primary challenges associated with the neutronic analysis of a nuclear reactor is accounting for temperature feedback due to Doppler broadening. This challenge is addressed by a new “on-the-fly” methodology that is applied during the random walk process in Monte Carlo codes with negligible impact on computational efficiency. The Monte Carlo code only needs to store 0 K cross sections for each isotope and the method will broaden the 0 K cross sections for any isotope in the library to any temperature in the range 77 to 3200 K for all incoming neutron energies up to 20 MeV. The methodology is based on a combination of Taylor series expansions and asymptotic series expansions. The type of series representation was determined by investigating the temperature dependence of 238U resonance cross sections in three regions: near the resonance peaks, midresonance, and the resonance wings. The coefficients for these series expansions were determined by a regression over the energy and temperature range of interest. Since the resonance parameters are a function of the neutron energy and the target nuclide, the ψ and χ functions in the Adler-Adler multilevel resonance model can be represented by series expansions in temperature only, allowing the least number of terms to approximate the temperature-dependent cross sections within a specified accuracy. The comparison of the broadened cross sections using this methodology with the NJOY cross sections was excellent over the entire temperature range (77 to 3200 K) and energy range. A Monte Carlo code was implemented to apply the combined regression model and used to estimate the additional computing cost, which was found to be <1%.