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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Aaron M. Phillippe, James E. Banfield, Kevin T. Clarno, Larry J. Ott, Bobby Philip, Mark A. Berrill, Rahul S. Sampath, Srikanth Allu, Steven P. Hamilton
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 2 | October 2014 | Pages 172-185
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-19
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The IFA-597 (Integrated Fuel Assessment) experiments from the International Fuel Performance Experiments database were designed to study the thermal behavior of mixed oxide (MOX) fuel and the effects of an annulus on fission gas release in light water reactor fuel. An evaluation of nuclear fuel pin heat transfer in the FRAPCON-3.4 and Exnihilo codes for MOX fuel systems was performed, with a focus on the first 20 time steps (∼6 GWd/tonne initial heavy metal) for explicit comparison between the codes. In addition, sensitivity studies were performed to evaluate the effect of the radial power shape and approximations to the geometry to account for the thermocouple hole, dish, and chamfer. The analysis demonstrated relative agreement for both solid (rod 1) and annular (rod 2) fuel in the experiment, demonstrating the accuracy of the codes and their underlying material models for MOX fuel, while also revealing a small energy loss artifact in how gap conductance is currently handled in Exnihilo for chamfered fuel pellets. The within-pellet power shape was shown to impact the predicted centerline temperatures significantly. This has provided an initial benchmarking of the pin heat transfer capability of Exnihilo for MOX fuel with respect to a well-validated nuclear fuel performance code. This analysis was done for a heavy-water boiling water reactor, but the conclusions are not limited by the reactor type beyond the spectrum and particular materials.
