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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Diana Schroen, Dan Goodin, Jared Hund, Reny Paguio, Barry McQuillan, Jonathan Streit
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 468-472
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology: Targets and Chambers | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1532
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The baseline design for the laser-driven Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) target is a 4.6 mm foam capsule with a polymer overcoat of 1 to 5 microns. The specifications for this overcoat include surface finish, permeation properties, uniform wall thickness and conformal coating of the foam shell. Many of these specifications are not unlike the full density polymer National Ignition Facility targets, but the foam shell adds to the fabrication difficulty. Since the foam surface is composed of open cells, creating the overcoat by typical vacuum deposition processes would start by replicating the foam surface making it very difficult to achieve the required surface specification. Instead an overcoat is made using interfacial polymerization at the edge of the foam surface. This is done by filling the foam shell with an organic solvent containing one reactant, then placing the shell into water containing another reactant. The reaction occurs only at the interface of the two solutions.This technique was pioneered at the Institute of Laser Engineering (Osaka University) with 0.8 mm diameter methacrylate shells. The process was later extended to 0.9 mm diameter resorcinol-formaldehyde and divinyl benzene (DVB) shells. For the High Average Power Laser Program target we need to extend the process to 4.6 mm diameter DVB foam shells. The properties of the DVB foam and the larger diameter of the shell make it more difficult to produce a gas tight shell. This report will explain how we are adapting the process and the results to date.