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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.
Technical Session|Panel|Sponsored by RPD
Tuesday, November 15, 2022|1:00–2:45PM MST|Sonoran 7
Session Chair:
Samuel E. Bays
Session Organizer:
Alternate Chair:
Massimiliano Fratoni
The Reactor Physics Division is hosting a panel discussion of the need for and development of a standard to address the initial fuel loading and startup testing of a demonstration first-of-a-kind reactor. Members of this expert panel will include program leaders from actual past reactors. The panel will include commercial reactor physics software developers with NQA-1 software quality experience. The panel will also include regulatory authority on advanced reactor licensing. Modeling software being used to design advanced reactors (fission batter, micro-, SMRs) today is typically validated using pre-existing peer reviewed integral benchmarks. Although benchmarking activities are very rigorous, the propagated uncertainties for as-built reactor systems can still be quite large. Additionally, the advanced reactor systems being considered today frequently have significant differences when compared with the historical reactor systems for which benchmarks are founded. Physics testing during reactor startup is the final opportunity for characterizing data uncertainty before hot full power operation. Therefore, a best practices standard is needed to provide guidance on how to leverage traditional startup procedures with software validation methods.
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