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Conference Spotlight
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.
Mohinder Singh, Akash Tondon, Bhajan Singh, B. S. Sandhu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 10 | October 2022 | Pages 1172-1193
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2067737
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work deals with the evaluation of interaction cross sections, effective atomic number, and effective electron density at gamma photon energies, not available from standard radioisotopes. The Compton scattering technique is used to obtain the required gamma energies within a specific range of energies from 241.8 to 401.8 keV to perform the radiation measurements. Radiation interaction parameters of some inorganic compounds (high-Z rare-earth nitrate hexahydrate), namely, Lanthanum(III) nitrate hexahydrate [La(NO3)3.6H2O] and Samarium(III) nitrate hexahydrate [Sm(NO3)3.6H2O], soluble in low-Z organic solvent (acetone) are evaluated. Six scattering angles are chosen to obtain six (not available from standard radioisotopes) Compton scattered energies to perform narrow-beam transmission experiments. An NaI(Tl) scintillation detector is used to detect the transmitted flux from the different solutions in various proportions. Photon interaction parameters useful in vast basic and applied fields are evaluated. The present measured results, obtained from the Compton scattered technique, are found to be in good agreement with the computed values of radiation interaction parameters obtained from the WinXCom program. The present data on rare-earth solutions have definite scientific importance in nuclear and radiation physics and fill in the gap of nonavailability of such data for radiation workers at these specific energies.