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November 9–12, 2025
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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.
Sante Cirant
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 12-38
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1650
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In any system designed for electron cyclotron (EC) heating (ECH) and EC current drive in fusion plasmas, the launcher is the matching element between the plasma and the transmission line. Only an appropriate launcher achieves efficient use of the gyrotron power for the many different high-power EC H&CD applications. The frontier is now set at [approximately equal to]4 MW of launched power at 110 to 140 GHz for [approximately equal to]10 s, to be further moved to [approximately equal to]10 MW, 1000 s in the near future. ITER will push the limit to 20 MW, 170 GHz. The workhorse of the antenna system is the front steering setup consisting of a movable mirror, or a mirror array, in front of the hot plasma, which provides for full flexibility in the EC H&CD applications. However, because of the concern associated with cooled and movable parts in a hostile environment, an arrangement with movable mirrors positioned far from the vessel port, and connected to the plasma by imaging waveguides, is being developed as a remote steering backup solution. In a reactor, where flexibility is much less relevant than reliability, the situation could reverse. Techniques for a radial scan of the deposition layer different from front beam steering are discussed in this paper. The ideal goal would be a 100% coupling of the launched EC power, to occur within [approximately equal to]2% of the plasma size and through pipes of size negligible with respect to the vessel, without negative impact on plasma periphery in spite of the high power densities transmitted through the edge.
