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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
I. Hill, N. Soppera, M. Bossant
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 3 | November 2014 | Pages 280-294
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-37
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The 2014 International Handbook of Evaluated Reactor Physics Benchmark Experiments (IRPhEP Handbook) spans over 30 000 pages and contains 136 evaluations. In the handbook, evaluations are grouped by reactor type (light water reactor, heavy water reactor, liquid metal cooled fast reactor, etc.) and contain up to ten different types of measurements, each of which can be applied to code and nuclear data validation. Despite the thoughtful organization and strict format rules for evaluations, identifying suitable validation cases remains challenging. To assist with searching and trending the IRPhEP Handbook, a relational database and user interface named IDAT (IRPhEP Database and Analysis Tool) was developed. IDAT was first distributed with the 2013 edition of the IRPhEP Handbook and will be updated annually as evaluations are added and revised. Data characterizing the measurements were extracted to allow for searching and trending in IDAT. Measurement types in the database include criticality, buckling, spectral characteristics, reactivity effects, reactivity coefficients, kinetics, reaction rates, and power distribution measurements. Additionally, the database contains calculated quantities, such as neutron flux/capture/fission spectrum data, neutron balance data, and keff sensitivity data, along with tools to visualize these data. IDAT can employ data to assist in the identification of similar experiments using a variety of metrics, within a “Rank Similar” pane. For each measurement in the database, there is also a “Trending” pane, allowing multilevel plots of calculated over experimental values allowing users to drill down by applying various filters. This paper describes the creation of IDAT as well as its features.
