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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.
Wadim Jaeger, Wolfgang Hering
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 160-170
Technical Paper – Selected papers from NURETH 2017 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1493855
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The heat transfer in liquid metal–cooled rod bundles is modeled with a knowledge-based best-estimate system code. Thereby, the focus is on the heat transfer enhancement due to flow perturbations. These perturbations are caused by local geometrical variations, such as sudden expansions and contractions, in the flow channel. The accurate calculation of the heat transfer is important for the safety demonstration of, e.g., subassemblies. Safety-related parameters, such as fluid and wall temperature, have to satisfy certain limits during normal and off-normal operation as well as during accidents. Up to now, fully developed flow is assumed for heat transfer in liquid metal–cooled rod bundles. The effects of local heat transfer enhancements were ignored in best-estimate system codes. The currently used empirical heat transfer models are functions of the Péclet number only. Several experimental and numerical investigations show that flow perturbations induce higher heat transfer due to increased turbulences, accelerated flows, and secondary motions. In this paper, the effects of the entrance region and the presence of spacer grids on the heat transfer are investigated. Empirical models for that are selected and applied. These empirical models are functions of the Péclet number, the geometrical perturbation, and the distance from the perturbation in the flowing direction. The calculated heat transfer coefficients at the bundle entrance and in the vicinity of spacer grids are twice as high compared to bare rod bundles under a fully developed flow condition without any flow perturbation. Because of the higher heat transfer, lower wall temperatures are to be expected. This provides additional safety margins during normal and off-normal operation as well as during accidents. Furthermore, the considerable increase of heat transfer shows that existing perturbations have to be considered to obtain accurate and reliable results.