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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.
Joel A. Kulesza, Roger L. Martz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 197 | Number 3 | March 2017 | Pages 284-295
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2016.1273711
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Despite being one of the most widely used benchmarks for qualifying light water reactor (LWR) radiation transport methods and data, no benchmark calculation of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) pool critical assembly (PCA) pressure vessel wall benchmark facility (PVWBF) using MCNP6 with explicitly modeled core geometry exists. As such, this paper provides results for such an analysis. First, a criticality calculation is used to construct the fixed source term. Next, ADVANTG-generated variance reduction parameters are used within the final MCNP6 fixed source calculations. These calculations provide unadjusted dosimetry results using three sets of dosimetry reaction cross sections of varying ages (those packaged with MCNP6, from the IRDF-2002 multigroup library, and from the ACE-formatted IRDFF v1.05 library). These results are then compared to two different sets of measured reaction rates. The comparison agrees in an overall sense within 2% and on a specific reaction and dosimetry location basis within 5%. Except for the neptunium dosimetry, the individual foil raw calculation-to-experiment comparisons usually agree within 10% but are typically greater than unity. Finally, in the course of developing these calculations, geometry that has previously not been completely specified is provided herein for the convenience of future analysts.