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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.
Akito Ipponsugi, Kazunari Katayama, Taku Matsumoto, Shogo Iwata, Makoto Oya, Youji Someya
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | May 2024 | Pages 253-259
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2271228
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several fusion plants plan to utilize two high-temperature and high-pressurized water coolant systems. Because of the high hydrogen-isotope mobility in high-temperature metal, tritium will inevitably transfer from the plasma side to the secondary coolant through the primary coolant. From the viewpoints of fuel control, tritium safety, and social acceptance, it is compulsory to investigate the tritium concentration dependence of permeation phenomena experimentally. Therefore, this study conducted a protium permeation experiment instead of tritium, which mocked the situation where the tritium concentration in the primary loop was extremely high. Considering the results in the previous tritium permeation research by the present authors, the tritium permeation behavior was likely proportional to the first power of the tritium concentration. Then, based on these experiments and references regarding the tritium permeation rate and water detritiation system (WDS) design, tritium concentration was computed in both loops. In this calculation condition, the primary and secondary loops reached about 0.4 TBq/kg and 167 MBq/kg during 3-year operations, respectively. Also, it was found that the required feed rate to keep the tritium concentration at 1 TBq/kg was 46.5 kg/h, which is less than the existing WDS specification.
