ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
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.
Vincent Philip Paglioni, Katrina M. Groth
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 8 | August 2024 | Pages 1645-1667
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2250159
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Human reliability analysis (HRA) is approaching nearly 60 years of reliance on key aspects of the original HRA method Technique for Human Error Rate Prediction (THERP), including its process for analyzing dependency. Despite advances in computational abilities and HRA-relevant techniques, the conceptualization, modeling, and quantification of dependency have remained largely unchanged since the introduction of THERP. As a result, current HRA methods do not consider dependency in a realistic manner, and there remain foundational gaps related to the definition, lack of causality, and quantification for HRA dependency. In this paper, we review the current conceptualization of dependency and demonstrate that current research in dependency is not addressing all of the technical gaps. To address the outstanding technical gaps in HRA dependency, we propose a set of fundamental dependency structures (HRA dependency idioms) that capture the spectrum of relationships possible between HRA variables. The idioms provide a robust logical structure for HRA dependency that emphasizes causality and is based on a causal Bayesian network modeling architecture. The idioms conceptualize and model HRA dependency in an objective, traceable, and causally informed manner that facilitates data-based quantification of HRA dependency.