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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.
Haihong Huang, Zhao Chen, Haixin Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 8 | November 2024 | Pages 941-959
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2271226
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To quickly output sufficient current for plasma excitation control, parallel operation of a structure of multiple branches is adopted in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fast control power supply. During the process of parallel operation of multiple branches in engineering, a larger inductance current sharing reactor is used to suppress the circulating current for the branches, which reduces the dynamic response speed of the output current and increases economic costs. In order to achieve cost savings and improve the dynamic response speed of the output current, the parallel branch current model of the EAST fast control power supply is analyzed, and the current of each branch is reconstructed into two parts: the current flowing to the load end and the circulating current flowing to other branches. Without changing the circuit structure and increasing the additional complex communication system for each branch, observation of the current flowing to the load end from each branch is achieved. Based on the observed current, a super-twisting sliding mode controller (STSMC) is designed to suppress the circulating current flowing through branches. To realize fast output of the branch current and circulating current suppression for the branches, a new STSMC with a linear term and parameter adaptive structure is designed, speeding up the convergence rate of the whole control system. The linear term and designed parameter adaptive structure based on the sliding mode system status ensure fast convergence speed and excellent control performance of the system. Simulation and experiments show that the designed control method can achieve fast output current control for each branch and that the tracking performance of the total output current is good. While reducing the inductance of the current sharing reactor, the circulating current for the branches is effectively suppressed compared with traditional control methods. The proposed method has great significance in cost savings and performance improvement in engineering practice applications.
