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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Vojtěch Galek, Anna Sears, Petr Pražák, Lucie Karásková-Nenadálová
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | May 2024 | Pages 321-329
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2024.2305996
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, and due to its limited supply and related high price, it is necessary to recover it from tritiated materials via detritiation technologies. The number of tritiated materials arises during fusion. Tritium from fusion reactors is deposited in the outer layer of plasma-facing materials, which must be dealt with during maintenance or decommissioning processes. A second source of waste is laboratory equipment that could be contaminated with tritium.
High-temperature treatment in an oxidation environment can achieve the release of tritium from metals or organic materials. The tritiated vapor is then captured in a series of water bubblers and reprocessed into pure T2. One of the high-temperature methods is molten salt oxidation (MSO), which uses high temperatures, alkaline salt, and an oxidative environment for flameless oxidation of different types of waste.
This work aimed to simulate the detritiation processes of tritiated organic materials in MSO technology. First, a series of experiments with D2O absorbed in ion resins was conducted. The organic waste was decomposed within the molten salt, and the flue gas was measured to determine the oxidation efficiency. The D2O was captured in a series of water bubblers, and the water was then analyzed with attenuated total reflectance (ATR)–Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). The results showed that all deuterium in the form of D2O was caught in the first water bubbler. The capture efficiency ranged from 22.32% to 61.13%. The lower efficiency capture can be explained as D2O in water can form a HDO molecule and its correct determination is problematic.
The second type of experiment was carried out with T2O with an activity of 851 Bq and with tritiated oil with an activity of 2495 Bq. The T2O was added to the set amount of ion resins and dosed into MSO. A peristaltic pump dosed the tritiated oil. The flue gas was measured to determine oxidation efficiency, and the T2O was captured within the water bubblers. The water was analyzed with liquid scintillation spectroscopy. The capture efficiency ranged between 76.42% to 97.87%. The results showed that this technology is suitable for the detritiation of tritiated organic materials.
