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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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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.
Jinghua Jiang, Yuanchen Qin, Lili Tong, Xuewu Cao, Songlin Liu, Xiaoman Cheng
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 8 | November 2024 | Pages 960-975
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2271234
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is presently in the engineering design phase, and it is crucial to establish a thermal-hydraulic safety analysis method. First of all, the identification of phenomena in selected accident scenarios affecting reactor safety performance metrics should be focused on with the phenomenon identification and ranking table (PIRT), in which phenomena related to the thermal-hydraulic safety of the vacuum vessel and related systems are screened, including both design-basis accidents and beyond-design-basis accidents.
The development of this PIRT exercise for CFETR thermal-hydraulic safety is addressed in this study; specifically, the importance ranking and stage of knowledge (SoK) of phenomena in the selected accidents are evaluated by the PIRT panel. The results of the PIRT analysis revealed that there exist certain safety-critical phenomena for which SoK is relatively low despite their perceived significance in safety performance metrics, which include the phase change of coolant, the migration of the multicomponent gas mixture, the migration of radionuclides within confinement, and the dispersion of gaseous radionuclides in the atmosphere. Ongoing research works and follow-up plans to improve the SoK of phenomena are presented.
