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Conference Spotlight
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.
Gregory A. Szalkowski, Justin Roper
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 7 | July 2019 | Pages 905-911
Technical Paper – Selected papers from the 2018 ANS Student Conference | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1533349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the increase in the precision of treatments delivered using radiotherapy machines, there has been a corresponding rise in demand for quality assurance tests that can verify the accuracy of these machines. One common test, star shot analysis, evaluates the isocenter stability of a radiotherapy machine using radiosensitive film or the electronic portal imaging device (EPID). This work details the development of an in-house method of automatically processing film and EPID images to conduct quality assurance testing. In contrast to commercially available software that analyzes a composite image star shot with multiple spokes superimposed on a single image, this work investigates a Gaussian peak finding technique while leveraging the EPID to image one spoke at a time.
Spoke-by-spoke analysis was used to investigate the effects of opposing angles on composite image star shot analysis and to assess for collimator trajectories with minimal walkout. This revealed that irradiating film using opposing angles can give artificially low variations in the radiation isocenter due to offsetting deviations from the true center and that walkout was not the same for every 180-deg arc for the collimator, implying that some rotation arcs could give less variation during treatment.