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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.
Yen-Fu Chen, Yen-Kung Lin, Rong-Jiun Sheu, Shiang-Huei Jiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 2 | November 2009 | Pages 508-512
Shielding | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 2) / Decontamination/Decommissioning | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9234
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper aims to estimate the residual activity in the concrete shielding of a nuclear power plant (NPP) after 40 yr of design service life and to determine if the whole massive concrete shielding must be treated as radioactive waste for future decommissioning. The process was a combination of experiment and calculation. Nonradioactive concrete samples collected from the Lungmen NPP were measured to determine the initial concentrations of major, minor, and trace elements in the concrete shielding by neutron activation analysis, inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, and elemental analysis. The neutron flux distribution and depth-dependent cross sections, which were generated by SAS1, in the 60-cm-thick reactor shielding wall and 200-cm-thick dry well wall of the Lungmen NPP were fed to the ORIGEN-S code to calculate the activity distribution in the concrete shielding after 40 yr of reactor full-power operation. Comparing the activity with the exemption levels, it was found that the dry well wall of the Lungmen NPP can be handled as construction waste for immediate decommissioning. However, most of the reactor shielding wall must be treated as radioactive waste even after a 25-yr cooling time.
