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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.
Chantal Cappelaere, Roger Limon, Christelle Duguay, Gérard Pinte, Michel Le Breton, Pol Bouffioux, Valérie Chabretou, Alain Miquet
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 2 | February 2012 | Pages 257-272
Technical Paper | Materials for Nuclear Systems | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13370
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
After irradiation and cooling in a pool, spent nuclear fuel assemblies are either transported for wet storage to a devoted site or loaded in casks for dry storage. During dry transportation or at the beginning of dry storage, the cladding is expected to be submitted to creep deformation under the hoop stress induced by the internal pressure of the fuel rod. The thermal creep is a potential mechanism that might lead to cladding failure. A new creep model was developed, based on a database of creep tests on as-received and irradiated cold-worked stress-relieved Zircaloy-4 cladding in a wide range of temperatures (310°C to 470°C) and hoop stress (80 to 260 MPa). Based on three laws - a flow law, a strain-hardening recovery law, and an annealing of irradiation hardening law - this model allows the simulation of not only the transient creep and the steady-state creep, but also the early creep acceleration observed on irradiated samples tested in severe conditions, which was not taken into account in the previous models.The extrapolation of the creep model in the conditions of very long-term creep tests is reassuring, proving the robustness of the chosen formalism. The creep model has been assessed in progressively decreasing stress conditions, more representative of a transport.Set up to predict the cladding creep behavior under variable temperature and stress conditions, this model can easily be implemented into codes in order to simulate the thermomechanical behavior of spent fuel rods in various scenarios of postirradiation phases.