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.
Edward J. Waller
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 89-92
Technical Note | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Measurements and General Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12275
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent nuclear weapons testing in the limit of low-yield detonations has underscored the need to ensure that radiation detection and monitoring equipment can adequately respond to these events. Testing and validating equipment in appropriate reference fields have become difficult since the closing of the NATO primary fission spectra reference at the Aberdeen Proving Ground Fast Burst Reactor facility post-9/11. A simple and low-cost device was designed to perform testing of commercial off-the-shelf neutron detection equipment to the expected spectral shape from a low-yield nuclear weapon. By enclosing an 241AmBe (,n) neutron source within a heavy water-moderated sphere, the general shape of a 1-kiloton standard fission weapon was generated at 1 m, valid between 100 and 2000 keV. The 1-m dose rate expected from this configuration is [approximately]2.16 × 10-10 Svh-1Bq-1 , which is less than one-half of the unshielded dose rate.