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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.
A. Klix, Ch. Adelhelm, U. Fischer, D. Gehre, T. Kaiser
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 1 | July-August 2012 | Pages 196-203
Blanket Materials Technology | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials, Part A: Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A14135
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A consortium of several European laboratories has performed neutronics experiments with a representative mock-up of the European helium-cooled lithium-lead (HCLL) test blanket module (TBM) irradiated with DT neutrons from intense neutron generators. The aim of these experiments was to provide experimental data for checking nuclear data and calculational tools for the prediction accuracy of important parameters such as the tritium production rate and neutron and gamma-ray flux spectra. The mock-up consisted of bricks of solid LiPb arranged in layers separated by Eurofer sheets. The 6Li concentration in the LiPb determines the slow neutron flux distribution in the mock-up, and an accurate knowledge of this value is of paramount importance for the analysis of these neutronics experiments. The analysis of the tritium production rate experiments revealed discrepancies between the real 6Li concentration and the one specified by the manufacturer of the LiPb (natural Li composition). Here we report on the investigation of the 6Li concentration in the LiPb with several experimental techniques: 1) time-of-arrival neutron spectra measured inside the mock-up irradiated with short pulses of 14-MeV neutrons from a DT neutron generator, 2) transmission measurements on LiPb bricks with moderated neutrons from an AmBe source to check for differences between bricks, and 3) mass spectroscopic methods on small samples taken from selected LiPb bricks. We found that the 6Li concentration varies only very little between the bricks. The weight fraction of lithium in the LiPb was 0.61 wt% as quoted by the manufacturer, but the 6Li abundance was half of the natural value in lithium, 3.8 at% instead of 7.5 at%.