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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Ronald F. Schmitt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 152-161
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9369
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two new methods for designing modular stellarator coils are presented. Stellarator coils provide necessary magnetic field to produce the plasma shape for a desired magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium. The methods optimize a continuous current on a surface - i.e., coil current is represented by a continuous-current sheet on a toroidal winding surface - and the process of coil cutting is not addressed. In contrast to previously published continuous-current methods that optimize coil current by minimizing the flux at the plasma boundary, the new methods presented in this paper search for optimal solutions by minimizing the displacement of the plasma boundary, i.e., the last closed magnetic surface. The physical displacement of the plasma boundary is computed from the magnetic field normal using linear MHD perturbation theory. A comparison with two similar continuous-current codes is given in terms of both methodology and results. The new codes show modest improvement over previously published continuous-current codes.
