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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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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.
Ion Cristescu, F. Priester, D. Rapisarda, A. Santucci, M. Utili
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 446-457
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1716456
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The development of commercial fusion power production using deuterium and tritium has been ongoing worldwide for decades and the European version of DEMO will undergo conceptual design between 2021 and 2027. Among the different ways to provide electrical power, nuclear fusion will be publicly accepted if the environmental impact is at tolerable levels. The auxiliary power requirements of fusion power reactors will need to be optimized, and heat will need to be efficiently converted to electrical power through the usage of high-temperature steam. On the other hand, heat might need to be intermittently stored to account for pulsed plasma operation, on the expense of the temperature level available for steam generation. Tritium is highly mobile and its management as far as containment and confinement are concerned becomes more difficult with the increasing temperatures of the structural materials; any effluents and releases should be kept to an absolute minimum. Therefore, tritium containment and confinement equipment and procedures need to be well integrated into the design and into the operation of fusion power reactors.
This paper focuses on the topics of the main tritium technologies under development in the EU DEMO Breeding Blanket Program, covering especially tritium breeding and extraction technologies. In addition, the identification of the main tritium sources as far as permeation and escape into the environment are concerned and the main barriers for the mitigation of tritium release into the environment are introduced.