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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.
Jinho Song, Changwook Huh, Namduk Suh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 178 | Number 3 | June 2012 | Pages 258-266
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13592
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Weaknesses of the current Severe Accident Management Guideline (SAMG) in handling the cooling of a molten core are discussed, and three improvements for the SAMG are presented. It is suggested that instrumentation to detect either a breach of the reactor vessel or a discharge of corium into the reactor cavity is essential to effectively perform the SAMG. A detailed analysis for a specific plant is necessary to make a decision as to whether preflooding or postflooding should be initiated for effective molten core cooling. Also, an optimal choice of depressurization capacity not only would significantly delay failure of the reactor vessel but also would increase the coolability margin of the molten corium in a reactor cavity. Analyses using the MELCOR computer code were performed for the Ulchin Units 1 and 2 and Kori Unit 1 nuclear power plants to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed improvements in cooling of the molten core in the reactor cavity, where in-vessel retention of molten corium by preflooding is not feasible.