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Conference Spotlight
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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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.
Max Aker, Marco Röllig
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 373-378
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1712989
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beta-induced X-ray spectrometry (BIXS) is a promising method for activity monitoring of tritiated gas species. BIXS systems measure bremsstrahlung and characteristic X-rays generated by interactions of beta decay electrons with surfaces within the measurement chamber. BIXS and other highly sensitive methods such as ionization counting are limited in accuracy by the tritium memory effect, a preconditioning dependent background signal caused by the sorption of tritium on surfaces. In this work, different surface materials have been investigated aiming at reducing the tritium memory effect while providing a high bremsstrahlung yield. A modular BIXS setup was developed that allows the consecutive investigation of different measurement cells utilizing the same detector while protecting it from contamination during cell exchanges. An uncoated stainless steel cell was compared to cells coated with Au, Ir, Ti-W, Ti-Au-Al, and Ti-Au-Cu layer systems. The sample cells were repeatedly exposed to 1100 Pa of molecular tritium. The development of the resulting memory effect was measured during the evacuation between consecutive exposures. Additionally, the background signal decay was investigated in a long-term measurement after the last exposure. In this presentation, the measurement results of the relative tritium memory effect from various surfaces will be shown. The lowest memory effect was measured for the gold-coated sample cell, reaching a background signal equal to (0.83 ± 0.14)% of the signal during exposure after a total dosage of 21.33 × 104 Pa h.
