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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. Puig Sitjes, M. Jakubowski, A. Ali, P. Drewelow, V. Moncada, F. Pisano, T. T. Ngo, B. Cannas, J. M. Travere, G. Kocsis, T. Szepesi, T. Szabolics, W7-X Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 74 | Number 1 | July-August 2018 | Pages 116-124
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1396860
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion experiment is aimed at proving that the stellarator concept is suitable for a future fusion reactor. Therefore, it is designed for steady-state plasmas of up to 30 min, which means that the thermal control of the plasma-facing components (PFCs) is of vital importance to prevent damage to the device.
In this paper an overview of the design of the Near Real-Time Image Diagnostic System (hereinafter called “the System”) for PFCs protection in W7-X is presented. The goal of the System is to monitor the PFCs with high risk of permanent damage due to local overheating during plasma operations and to send alarms to the interlock system. The monitoring of the PFCs is based on thermographic and video cameras, and their video streams are analyzed by means of graphics processing unit–based computer vision techniques to detect the strike line, hot spots, and other thermal events. The video streams and the detected thermal events are displayed online in the control room in the form of a thermal map and permanently stored in the database. In order to determine the emissivity and maximum temperature allowed, a pixel-based correspondence between the image and the observed device part is required. The three-dimensional geometry of W7-X makes the System particularly sensitive to the spatial calibration of the cameras since hot spots can be expected anywhere, and a full segmentation of the field of view is necessary, in contrast to other regions of interest–based systems. A precise registration of the field of view and a correction of the strong lens distortion caused by the wide-angle optical system are then required.
During the next operation phase the uncooled graphite divertor units will allow the System to be tested without risk of damaging the divertors in preparation for when water-cooled high-heat-flux divertors will be used.