Features

Mike Harkin

When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.

The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.

We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.

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.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

This month, September 8–11, the American Nuclear Society is teaming up with the Nuclear Energy Institute to host our first-ever Nuclear Energy Conference and Expo—NECX for short—in Atlanta. This new meeting combines ANS’s Utility Working Conference and NEI’s Nuclear Energy Assembly to form what NEI CEO Maria Korsnick and I hope will be the premier nuclear industry gathering in America.

We did this because after more than four decades of relative stagnation, the U.S. nuclear supply chain is finally entering a new era of dynamic growth. This resurgence is being driven by several powerful and increasingly durable forces: the explosive demand for electricity from artificial intelligence and data centers, an unprecedented wave of public and private acceptance of—and investment in—advanced nuclear technologies, and a strong market signal for reliable, on-demand power. Add the recent Trump administration executive orders on nuclear into the mix, and you have all the makings of an accelerant-rich business environment primed for rapid expansion.

Despite the emergence of new projects, technologies, and commercial ventures, the rate of actual deployment worldwide has been relatively slow—but not necessarily for the reasons people might think.

Hash Hashemian
president@ans.org

Last month, I talked about my goal of strengthening ANS’s voice, in part by attending three conferences. I have now checked the first event off that list: the Nuclear Opportunities Workshop.

This year, NOW took another step in outgrowing its “workshop” moniker and transitioning to a full-fledged regional conference and expo. What started only a few years ago as a small gathering in Oak Ridge, Tenn., with roughly 50 attendees has skyrocketed to an event with 1,100 people in attendance in Knoxville.

NOW’s popularity reflected how busy the roughly 350 nuclear companies in Tennessee have been in recent years. There is significant work going on surrounding Gen IV reactor development and deployment, advancements in new nuclear fuels, and defense-related builds like the Uranium Processing Facility.

Here is a recap of industry happenings from the recent past:

ADVANCED REACTOR MARKETPLACE

Progress continues on ITER vacuum vessel construction

Westinghouse Electric Company has signed a $180 million contract with the ITER Organization for the assembly of ITER’s vacuum vessel. Westinghouse has been collaborating with ITER for more than a decade, including in the manufacturing of sectors for the tokamak device’s vacuum vessel, in cooperation with its partners in the AMW consortium, Ansaldo Nucleare and Walter Tosto. After all the vacuum vessel sectors are in place, Westinghouse plans to simultaneously weld the nine sectors to form one circular ring-shaped torus.

As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.

Sukesh Aghara

In an era when affordable, clean energy is as much an economic imperative as it is an environmental one, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has an opportunity to lead not just through legislation but through partnership—between state leadership and its world-class universities.

Massachusetts has long led on decarbonization through electric vehicle adoption, rooftop solar, and offshore wind. We have reduced energy consumption through efficiency investments. From 2022 to 2024 alone, the state’s Mass Save programs facilitated energy savings equal to the annual usage of over 852,000 homes, avoided 684,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, and delivered $2.3 billion in customer incentives. But to meet growing demand and industrial needs, it’s time to invite universities to help craft a bolder vision—one that includes advanced nuclear technologies.

On April 22, 1959, Rear Admiral George J. King, superintendent of the Maine Maritime Academy, announced that following the completion of the 1960 training cruise, cadets would begin the study of nuclear engineering. Courses at that time included radiation physics, reactor control and instrumentation, reactor theory and engineering, thermodynamics, shielding, core design, reactor maintenance, and nuclear aspects.

As most attendees of this year’s ANS Annual Conference left breakfast in the Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Downtown Marriott to sit in on presentations covering everything from career pathways in fusion to recently digitized archival nuclear films, 40 of them made their way to the hotel’s fifth floor to take part in the second offering of Nuclear 101, a newly designed certification course that seeks to give professionals who are in or adjacent to the industry an in-depth understanding of the essentials of nuclear energy and engineering from some of the field’s leading experts.

When small modular reactors and other advanced nuclear plants someday provide electricity, hydrogen, desalination, and district heating, the North Carolina Collaboratory will deserve some credit. Headquartered at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, the collaboratory is a research funding agency established by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2016 to partner with academic institutions and government agencies. Its goal is to help transform research into practical applications for the benefit of North Carolina’s state and local economies. To that end, it engages in research projects related to advanced nuclear energy, among other initiatives.

...and today.

Levin in the late 1980s...

Growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s and ’60s, I had interests in two areas that ultimately had major impacts on my education and career. The first was science—especially nuclear physics—and the second was science fiction.

One early influence was undoubtedly Disney’s short film “Our Friend the Atom.” I don’t recall exactly when or where I saw it, but I clearly remember the demonstration of a chain reaction with mousetraps and ping pong balls. It looked like an exciting area about which to learn.

I also had a shelf full of Tom Swift Jr. sci-fi/adventure books, and around the fourth grade I discovered Robert Heinlein—specifically, his book Have Space Suit, Will Travel. Kip Russell, the teenage hero of the book, is abducted by hostile space aliens but manages to escape and, with the help of a friendly alien, saves Earth from destruction. At the end, having returned to Earth, Kip prepares to go off to college at MIT. With the assistance of my trusty World Book Encyclopedia, I researched MIT and decided—rather audaciously at the age of 10—that I would go there, too.

Here’s an easy way to make aging U.S. power reactors look relatively youthful: Compare them (average age: 43) with the nation’s university research reactors. The 25 operating today have been licensed for an average of about 58 years.

Hash Hashemian
president@ans.org

The 2025 ANS Annual Conference in Chicago was a powerful springboard to begin my term as president. With over 1,400 attendees, it was one of our most dynamic gatherings in recent memory—full of energy, ideas, and a shared commitment to advancing nuclear science and technology.

As we move forward, my focus is clear: to elevate the role of nuclear in environmental protection, national security, energy diversity, and grid stability. These priorities are not just strategic—they are essential to a cleaner, more resilient future.

The goals I laid out at the conclusion of the Board of Directors meeting in June are simple, but I am sure they will be effective in engaging our community.

One simple change to start is the move away from the term meetings—the American Nuclear Society now uses the term conferences to describe its two yearly flagship gatherings, to more appropriately reflect the more than 1,000 attendees that these events bring together.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

For the past few years, I have been conducting a thoroughly unscientific, one-question poll of nuclear utility and supplier CEOs and senior executives: “What keeps you up at night?” The number one answer is—and has been from the beginning—“Workforce.”

The ongoing shortage of skilled labor—welders, pipefitters, electricians, and the like—almost always gets top billing in nuclear workforce discussions. In April 2025, the U.S. had an eye-popping 600,000 unfilled positions in the construction and manufacturing sectors. This consistent supply gap feeds a continuing talent war that has pushed craft wages up 20 percent since the end of the COVID pandemic, straining project budgets and profit margins alike.

Perhaps the most underappreciated gap in the nuclear workforce is professional and business services. It is the second-largest employment category in the nuclear industry, according to the Department of Energy’s 2024 U.S. Energy & Employment Report.

One of the more pivotal issues in facilitating the use of radiation sources—including nuclear power—in the United States (and most of the Western world) is concern about the health effects of low levels of radiation. The current regulatory assumption is that every additional increment of radiation linearly increases the risk of cancer.

Chris Wagner has more than 40 years of experience in nuclear medicine, beginning as a clinical practitioner before moving into leadership roles at companies like Mallinckrodt (now Curium) and Nordion. His knowledge of both the clinical and the manufacturing sides of nuclear medicine laid the groundwork for helping to found Eden Radioisotopes, a start-up venture that intends to make diagnostic and therapeutic raw material medical isotopes like molybdenum-99 and lutetium-177.

Editor's note: This article has was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with new information as of June 2025.

Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.

Kathryn Higley

For nearly a century, the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements has served as the United States’ leading authority on radiation protection. Established in 1929 as the Advisory Committee on X-ray and Radium Protection, the NCRP was created in response to growing concerns about the health risks of radiation exposure following the discoveries of X-rays and radioactivity.

It was formally chartered by Congress in 1964 through Public Law 88-376, also known as the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements Charter Act. The NCRP has provided science-­based guidance for the public, workers, and the environment. Its work spans a wide range of topics, including protecting patients and workers in medical, industrial, and environmental settings; supporting emergency preparedness; developing risk models for low-dose exposures; guiding safe practices for new technologies such as advanced nuclear reactors; and providing information on wireless communication devices.

Hash Hashemian
president@ans.org

I am deeply honored and grateful to have been elected president of the American Nuclear Society. Your support and confidence in me are truly humbling, and I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you.

As president, my top priority is to expedite the deployment of new nuclear reactors, beginning with small modular reactors and eventually progressing to Generation IV systems. I will also work to ensure that the United States keeps its global leadership in this field. For the U.S. to do that, the federal government must maintain and expand its financial support of the nuclear industry by preserving critical incentives, tax provisions, and infrastructure investments.