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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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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.
2020 ANS Virtual Winter Meeting Plenary Session Speaker
Thomas Zacharia, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), guides 5,400 staff in solving scientific and technical challenges for the U.S. Department of Energy and other sponsors, managing an annual budget of $2 billion. Following a postdoctoral appointment, Thomas joined ORNL's Metals and Ceramics Division in 1989. He established and led the Materials Modeling and Simulation Group and became director of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division in 1998, Deputy Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for High Performance Computing in 2000, and ALD for Computing and Computational Sciences in 2001. He led the creation of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, fielding the world's fastest supercomputer, and led delivery of a petascale system for the National Science Foundation in 2008. Before becoming ORNL's director, he was Deputy for Science and Technology. Thomas holds a B.S. from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India, an M.S. from the University of Mississippi, and a Ph.D. from Clarkson University. He holds two patents and has authored more than 100 publications. He co-chairs the National Commission on Innovation and Competitiveness Frontiers established by the Council on Competitiveness. He is a Fellow of the American Welding Society, a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Astronautics, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Last modified October 20, 2020, 3:28pm EDT