ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
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.
L. A. El-Guebaly, ARIES Team, and FNSF Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 74 | Number 4 | November 2018 | Pages 340-369
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1494946
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In recent decades, fusion energy for electricity has become an international issue with worldwide interest in several magnetic fusion concepts offering the most promising energy source for this century. From existing experiments to power plants, several next-step facilities (NSFs) must be built to bridge the large gaps in fusion science and nuclear technology. During the course of fusion studies, all power plants and NSFs require an integral nuclear assessment to identify the nuclear parameters and address key issues related to tritium breeding ratio (TBR), blanket design, selection of low-activation materials, radial/vertical build optimization and definition, magnet protection, shielding, activation, and survivability of structural materials in 14-MeV neutron environment. This paper presents our design philosophy, nuclear assessment approach, and recent research results for ARIES conceptual tokamak, spherical tokamak, and stellarator power plants as well as NSFs. Some features of the nuclear activities [such as tritium breeding requirement (overall TBR = 1.05), blanket concept, and radwaste issues] remained fixed between the various designs, while others [such as service lifetime (20 to 200 displacements per atom) and shielding requirements] were subject to change to meet the specific design needs. Emerging challenges and lessons learned from nuclear assessments performed during recent decades are highlighted throughout the paper. In particular, the cost implication of uncertainties in the TBR prediction and the large amount of low-level waste generation are important challenges facing the fusion community and should be addressed by interdisciplinary research programs.
