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Conference Spotlight
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.
Cheng-Kai Tai, Jiaxin Mao, Victor Petrov, Annalisa Manera, Igor A. Bolotnov
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 7 | July 2024 | Pages 1347-1370
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2197656
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Stable density stratification in a large enclosure could significantly hamper the effectiveness of natural convection cooling in pool-type liquid metal or gas-cooled advanced reactors. In addition, accurate prediction of stratified front behavior remains to be a challenging task for turbulence modeling. With the rapid growth of high-performance-computing capabilities in recent years, conducting high-fidelity simulations for a large-timescale transient has become more affordable and hence a valuable data source to support turbulence modeling as well as to gain further physical insights. In this work, direct numerical simulation is performed at experiment-consistent conditions to simulate the density stratification transient High-Resolution Jet (HiRJET) facility. Specifically, we focus on the case where an injected aqueous sugar solution has 1.5% density higher than that in the enclosure. In the early stage of the transient, the impingement of the denser jet to the bottom surface of the enclosure promoted turbulent mixing locally. This rendered the establishment of the mixture layer, formation and swift upward propagation of the stratified front, and elevation with (locally) the highest vertical concentration gradient. As the front rose, the diminishing turbulent mass flux slowed down the propagation, and a larger vertical concentration gradient was established. In this stage, both the velocity and the concentration scalar showed large-timescale fluctuation behavior around the stratified front. For the concentration time signal, the characteristic frequency in the power spectral density was found to agree well with the Brunt-Väisällä frequency. The preliminary validation endeavor showed that the stratified front location and the corresponding concentration gradient magnitude in the simulation agreed well with the experiment data. Further validation will mainly revolve around benchmarking against high-resolution density measurement and high-order flow statistics.