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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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October 2025
Latest News
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.
Aurelien Chassery, Helene Lorcet, Joel Godlewski, Karine Liger, Christian Latge, Xavier Joulia
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 2 | March 2015 | Pages 300-303
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T15
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Within the framework of the dismantling of fast breeder reactors in France (PHENIX, SUPERPHENIX, RAPSODIE), several processes are under investigation regarding sodium disposal. One of them, called ELA (radioactive sodium waste treatment process), is based on the implementation of the sodium-water reaction, in a controlled and progressive way, to remove residual sodium mainly from the sodium purification systems called cold traps. This sodium contains impurities such as sodium hydride, sodium oxide and tritiated sodium hydride. The hydrolysis of these various chemical species leads to the production of a liquid effluent, mainly composed of an aqueous solution of sodium hydroxide, and a gaseous effluent, mainly composed of nitrogen (inert gas), hydrogen and steam. The tritium is distributed between these effluents, and, within the gaseous effluent, according to its forms HT and HTO. HTO being 10,000 times more radiotoxic than HT, a precise knowledge of the mechanisms governing the phase distribution of tritium is necessary. Indeed, it will help to design the process needed to optimize the treatment of the off-gas before its release into the environment. This paper presents the first experimental results from a parametric study on the tritium distribution between the various effluents generated during hydrolysis operations. This parametric study has been performed in a laboratory scale hydrolysis process designed at the CEA Cadarache.
