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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!
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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.
Nathan Nicholas, Bryce Shaffer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 366-372
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1712988
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Over the past decade, Air Squared has been actively developing and improving the highly anticipated 15 m3/h tritium vacuum pump to replace the obsolete industry standard Normetex scroll pump. The all-metal pump features a metal bellows that hermetically seals all tritium gas from any material other than metal. Air Squared has listened to the tritium market’s needs and is currently developing the latest addition to the Air Squared tritium vacuum pump line: the 150 m3/h liquid cooled all-metal (LCAM) scroll vacuum pump. Through numerous hours of testing, Air Squared has demonstrated the advantages of LCAM scroll vacuum pumps. The effect that thermal expansion has on highly toleranced all-metal pumps has been observed and characterized to predict pump performance as well as provide safe operational temperature limits. Performance characteristics of the 15 m3/h pump have been analyzed with different process gases to understand the effects of pumping light gases. Vacuum pumping speed curves have been generated at various interstage pressures to understand the advantages that roughing pump systems have when used in series with all-metal scroll vacuum pumps. This paper presents Air Squared’s 15 m3/h designs and highlights the performance characteristics. The effects that pump temperature, process gas, and fore-vacuum have on all-metal scroll vacuum pumps are explained with empirical data collected over a decade of research. With the knowledge and data collected, Air Squared has a pathway for a new industry standard 15 m3/h and 150 m3/h positive displacement scroll pump for tritium service to support international nuclear fusion and tritium research.
