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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!
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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.
Richard W. Smith, Gary S. Was
Nuclear Technology | Volume 69 | Number 2 | May 1985 | Pages 198-209
Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33631
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The FCODE-BETA/SS code, based on the Electric Power Research Institute’s FCODE-BETA, is constructed to model the thermal-mechanical performance of Type 304 stainless steel clad pressurized water reactor fuel rods. Specifically, thermal expansion, thermal conductivity, irradiation creep, temperature-dependent material parameters and gap conductance for Type 304 stainless steel clad fuel rods are modeled. FCODEBETA/SS is benchmarked against end-oflife fission gas release and creep strain data from Connecticut Yankee fuel rods. Benchmarking results on key performance variables are comparable to those of FCODEBETA and COMETHE. Using FCODE-BETA/SS to compare the performance of Type 304 stainless steel and Zircaloy clad fuel over a common power history reveals that Type 304 stainless steel clad rods display higher fuel temperatures, wider gaps, and longer times to gap closure than Zircaloy clad rods. The stainless steel cladding spends only a small fraction of life in a state of tensile stress at the ridge, but the magnitudes of these ridge stresses are significantly greater than those found in Zircaloy rods. Nevertheless, the thermal performance of the two rod types is very similar.
