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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.
Yiqian Wu, Zhiyao Liu, Ming Jia, Cong Chi Tran, Shengyuan Yan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 1 | January 2020 | Pages 94-106
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1620055
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The development of a model for mental workload (MWL) prediction of an operator in nuclear power plants (NPPs) is necessary but challenging. In this study, the validity, sensitivity, and relationship between the four indices of eye tracking (i.e., pupil dilation, blink rate, fixation rate, and saccadic rate) and subjective rating method (i.e., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration-Task Load Index) of both experts and nonexperts when they are operating the state-oriented procedure system in NPPs are analyzed. An artificial neural network (ANN) is used to develop the MWL prediction model using the data of nonexperts. The correlation analysis results indicate that four eye tracking indices are sensitive to the subjective MWL, but there is no significant difference in the pupil diameter and saccadic rate between the experts and nonexperts. The validity of the proposed ANN-based prediction model is proven by the high correlation coefficient (higher than 0.95) between the original and predicted data. However, when the proposed ANN model was applied to the experts’ data, there was a significant difference between the original and predicted data. Therefore, the proposed prediction model can be applied to the experts’ data but with a certain adjustment to obtain the most possibly reasonable results.