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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.
Jacobus J. Hancke, John C. Barry, Gerrit T. Van Rooyen, Johan P. R. De Villiers
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 2 | November 2012 | Pages 149-158
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A14630
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Coater parameters such as deposition temperature, volume percent of methyltrichlorosilane, and total gas flow were varied to study the effect on the ratio of defective TRISO nuclear fuel particles. The burn-leach test and other leach tests were performed to determine the defect ratio on samples of particles representing these variations. In the narrow ranges that were used, none of these parameters showed any correlation with the burn-leach result. However, a reduction in the density of the directly underlying carbon layer showed a marked increase in the defect ratio of particles. No trend could be observed when the density of the carbon layer was varied in the range of 1.8 to 2 g/cm3 , specified for TRISO particles. But, when the density was reduced to 1.7 and 1.6 g/cm3 , it was seldom possible to produce a batch that did not leach uranium, in spite of having a good quality SiC layer. This indicates that the integrity of the SiC layer is influenced by the quality of the underlying carbon layer. Mechanical damage is proposed as a mechanism responsible for the defective particles that are detected with the leach methods. This mechanism could be the reason for the variations in the leach results. Calculations and some examples show that all defects are not detected with the leach methods, probably because of the limited duration of these tests.
