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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.
Leif Holmlid
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 74 | Number 3 | October 2018 | Pages 219-228
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1421366
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A generator for ultradense hydrogen H(0) also generates kaons, pions, and muons both spontaneously and after laser-pulse induction. The negative muons formed can be used to generate the well-studied muon-catalyzed nuclear fusion D + D process in deuterium gas D2. Both laser-induced and spontaneous neutron emissions are now observed from the generator by commercial neutron detectors. Thermalization with polyethylene plastic blocks is used for the 6Li thermal neutron detectors (Kromek TN15 and Saint Gobain BC-702), which increases the signal rate; the background in the laboratory increases by a factor of 3. A laser-induced neutron signal is observed with D2 gas at pressure <1 bar. It is attributed to muon-catalyzed fusion by slow muons in the D2 gas at high D2 pressure. The size of the neutron signal is limited by the relatively inefficient moderation of the muons before their decay in the low D2 gas pressure used. With ordinary hydrogen H2 or p2 (protium), no fusion but only a low signal possibly from capture-generated neutrons is observed. This neutron signal in p2 gas is often temporarily depressed by the laser probably due to changes in the p(0) material. The spontaneous signal using p2 in the generator can be due to neutron-ejecting capture processes caused by muons formed spontaneously in the generator, while the spontaneous signal with D2 may be due to muon-catalyzed fusion as well as capture processes.