Gale Hauck, engineering project manager at Westinghouse Electric Company, is the new chair of the American Nuclear Society's Young Members Group (YMG). YMG Secretary Elia Merzari caught up with her and asked her to introduce herself, as well as her plans for the YMG.

Attention ANS Young Members:

Ready for the next leap in your career? Who doesn't like extra letters after their name? Well then, why not get a Professional Engineer license?

One of the missions of the American Nuclear Society's Young Members Group is to promote participation of young members in the activities of the society. Boosting the involvement of young members in the technical programs of the society's professional divisions is an important goal in this effort.

Do you know someone who has worked tirelessly toward integrating young members into the American Nuclear Society? Do you know someone in the ANS Young Members Group who has demonstrated continued overall excellence in many areas? Now is your chance to nominate that person for national recognition of their efforts.

Every member of the nuclear industry has a responsibility to focus on his or her own career development as a component of continuous improvement. While this is good advice, young professionals often struggle with how to identify these development opportunities. The question of how to overcome this challenge spirited discussion at the 2011 Young Professionals Conference.

During the American Nuclear Society's 2011 Winter Meeting in November, about 90 ANS members visited lawmakers to promote nuclear energy and technology as part of the ANS/Young Professionals Congress visit to Capitol Hill. As a student at Purdue University, which is located in Indiana, I met with legislative assistants from the offices of Indiana senators Richard Lugar (R.) and Dan Coats (R.) and Congressman Todd Rokita (R.).

One of the most exciting and important events at the American Nuclear Society's Winter Meeting in Washington, DC, this year was the "Capitol Hill Day" visit held on November 4.  This event allowed society members the opportunity to go to Capitol Hill to meet with congress persons and staffs, and to offer unique expertise as the world's foremost experts in nuclear technologies.

Snow day

Your reporter has been tramping around chilly Washington, DC, beset by an unseasonable early snow storm on Saturday. At the American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting, aptly named this year, I'm collecting observations, rumors, and raw random data, throwing out the rumors and keeping the rest to post here. This will be a daily feature through Wednesday of this week.

 We are just a few days away from the 2011 Young Professionals Congress, taking place during the ANS Winter Meeting next week in Washington, DC. We have many exciting and informative sessions scheduled for the meeting-informational sessions on important current topics, workshops, and interactive skills sessions (to find out more, see Nuclear Cafe posts 9-21 and  8-30).

The 2011 Young Professionals Congress (YPC 2011) is coming, and the time to register is now! YPC 2011 is an embedded topical of the American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting in Washington, DC, October 30-November 3, 2011. YPC2011 is the fourth YPC, and the second to be held as an embedded topical in parallel with the ANS Winter Meeting.

It's time to make plans to attend the American Nuclear Society's 2011 Winter Meeting and Nuclear Technology Expo, this year held in Washington, DC, on October 30-November 3 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel.

The American Nuclear Society's Young Members Group, with the help of ANS's Nuclear Installation Safety Division, is organizing a panel session at the Young Professionals Congress (an embedded topical at the 2011 ANS Winter Meeting) on the history of severe nuclear accidents.

The Young Members Group of the American Nuclear Society is accepting nominations for the two YMG national awards. Each award will be presented at the ANS Winter Conference.

About 35 percent of current nuclear workers will retire in next five years. Where will the next generation come from?

The basic thesis of a post I wrote in January was that the Chernobyl accident was far enough in the past that the younger generation in the nuclear industry did not have the first-hand memories of the experience, and therefore lacked some of the emotional understanding of the event. I suggested that there should be a conscious effort to pass on how Chernobyl and Three Mile Island affected the culture of the industry.

I teach students of engineering. Many of them (although certainly not all) prefer logarithms to literature and algebra to anthropology. No doubt they get a fair share of that in my classes, but I try to include a bit of history whenever I can.

At a session on educational programs during a recent ANS meeting, a fairly new graduate student in nuclear engineering described a nuclear survey course that he had taken at his university. The graduate student had not studied nuclear engineering as an undergrad, and when he said, "I had never really heard of Chernobyl before I took this course," you could almost hear an audible gasp among the more, well, mature members of the audience.

What does it mean to be a nuclear engineer? That question is not as

This year's North American - Young Generation in Nuclear (NA-YGN) continental conference was held in May and was themed "Leading the Change: Go Green." Participants learned that the future of electricity production in the United States would be heavily influenced by the desire to combat global warming. This desire is starting a national debate on how the country should select technologies for new electricity production facilities.