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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.
Vedant K. Mehta, Zachary A. Miller, Dasari V. Rao
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 2161-2175
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2164150
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Metal hydrides are being seriously considered for advanced nuclear reactor or microreactor applications due to their solid physical state and high hydrogen density. Using hydrides for autonomous applications poses several research and development challenges, one of which relates to neutron upscattering in the thermal energy regime. These hydrides, including zirconium hydride and yttrium hydride, result in a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity for several advanced reactor designs. In this study, we consider one such design that exhibits positive feedback from metal hydrides and thoroughly investigate the neutronic aspects of the core. Temperature reactivity coefficients for four fuels and two hydride moderator configurations are studied, and the total temperature coefficients are found to be positive for all designs, showing that this issue cannot be resolved simply by material variations. Accordingly, five epi-thermal absorbers were evaluated to demonstrate the feasibility of the excess positive feedback suppression in the core instigating from neutron energy spectrum shift. Following which, two promising burnable poison candidates are selected to investigate further throughout the core discharge. Promising results are shown for this core design, which can be extended to other hydride-moderated remote special-purpose reactor designs.