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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
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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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.
Antonio Ballesteros, Radian Sanda, Michael Maqua, Jean-Luc Stephan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 184 | Number 4 | December 2016 | Pages 575-583
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE16-80
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An in-depth analysis of maintenance-related events was performed by screening four different databases. The events cover the period 2002 to 2013. A total of 921 events were selected for analysis. An examination of the selected events resulted in their classification into nine categories or groups (e.g., plant state, type of maintenance, affected component, root cause, etc.). For further analyses, the categories were divided into families and, if necessary, into subfamilies. One of the event classifications was according to the type of maintenance (periodic, predictive, planned, and corrective). The data analysis indicated that 47% of the events reported were related to periodic maintenance. The main affected components were valves (with 33% of the events), followed by electric power components (23%). The main root causes observed are maintenance performed incorrectly (27%), deficiencies in written procedures or documents (19%), and deficiencies in management or organization (17%). Regarding the impact on safety, the dominant family is potential effects on safety function (57%), followed by significant effect on operation (20%).
