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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.
Bernd Grambow, Andreas Loida, Emmanuel Smailos
Nuclear Technology | Volume 121 | Number 2 | February 1998 | Pages 174-188
Technical Paper | German Direct Disposal Project | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2830
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results are summarized of 15 yr of German research on spent fuel with respect to its suitability as a waste form disposed of in a repository located in the Gorleben salt dome. Within the multibarrier system for long-term isolation of high-level waste (HLW), the innermost engineered barrier "canistered spent fuel" contributes essentially to isolating radionuclides from the biosphere if a salt brine were to come into contact with the waste form. A large fraction of the radionuclide contents of the reacted fuel mass would become reimmobilized within secondary alteration products and on container corrosion products, but inevitably a certain nuclide-specific fraction would be released into the aqueous geochemical environment. The corrosion resistance of the fuel and the radionuclide mobility are not inherent materials properties but also depend on geological disposal conditions, packing concepts, and radioactive decay. In particular, the availability of oxidants is critical, controlling spent-fuel alteration rates and alteration products as well as radionuclide solubilities. Spent fuel is at least as suitable for final disposal as is HLW glass.
