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Conference Spotlight
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.
Clifford E. Singer, Hermann von Brevern
Nuclear Technology | Volume 176 | Number 2 | November 2011 | Pages 227-237
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A13298
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Formulas are given for extrapolating uranium prices that could result from future trajectories for the cumulative use of native uranium. The logarithm of the extrapolated price is given by a monotonically increasing trend curve plus a sinusoidal oscillation calibrated to historical data. The trend curve as a function of cumulative extraction of native uranium accounts both for accessing lower ore grades and for exploiting more-difficult-to-access richer ores as the more easily accessed richer ores are depleted. Accounting for both of these effects, the logarithm of the monotonic price trend is linear in the logarithm of cumulative extraction of native uranium, with least variance between observations and data of a power-law slope of 1/4.5 up to the point where a limit on the accessibility of the remaining highest-grade ores is reached. (However, a slope of 1/5.6 gives an almost equally good fit.) As an example, a ratio 4 of maximum depth of other mines to maximum depth of current uranium mines is used as a measure of the accessibility limit. This limit is first reached when the background trend curve uranium price reaches $143/kg of elemental uranium, in U.S. dollars inflation adjusted to year 2007 prices ($US2007). Thereafter, the accessibility limit gradually reduces the cumulative amount of native uranium extracted at a given cost below that computed from the power law, multiplying it by a factor of 0.59 when the trend price reaches 300 $US2007/kg. Increases of nuclear energy produced per kilogram of uranium mined with increasing uranium costs are also accounted for. A fraction of global nuclear energy users can develop a higher nuclear energy production rate per kilogram of mined uranium, e.g., by reusing the fissile material in spent fuel. Resulting cumulative cost changes as a function of cumulative nuclear energy use are presented in graphical and tabular form for a variety of input parameters.