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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Paul W. Humrickhouse, Brad J. Merrill
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 295-302
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-941
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is envisioned that tritium will be extracted from DCLL blankets using a vacuum permeator. We derive here an analytical solution for the extraction efficiency of a permeator tube, which is a function of only two dimensionless numbers: one that indicates whether radial transport is limited by the PbLi or by the solid membrane, and another that is the ratio of axial and radial transport times in the PbLi. The permeator efficiency is maximized by decreasing the velocity and tube diameter, and increasing the tube length. This is true regardless of the mass transport correlation used; we review several and find that they differ little, and the choice of correlation is not a source of significant uncertainty here. The PbLi solubility, on the other hand, is a large source of uncertainty, and we identify upper and lower bounds from the literature data. Under the most optimistic assumptions, we find that a ferritic steel permeator operating at 470 °C will need to be about twenty times larger in volume than previous conceptual designs using niobium and operating at higher temperatures.