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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.
G. L. Beausoleil, II, G. L. Povirk, B. J. Curnutt
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 3 | March 2020 | Pages 444-457
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1631052
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) has been used successfully for the testing of fast reactor fuel for nearly two decades. These successes have been in spite of numerous challenges for testing fast reactor fuel in the ATR (a thermal spectrum reactor), but the solutions to those challenges have resulted in excessively long irradiation times (~10 years) for high-burnup targets as well as experiments that are highly sensitive to fabrication tolerances and eccentricities. This paper presents a solution to the problems of extended irradiation times and fabrication sensitivities. Thermal and neutronic analyses were performed to show that a reduced-diameter fuel pin with an equivalent linear heat generation rate can provide a prototypic thermal profile (peak centerline and inner clad temperature) along with a near-prototypic power profile within the ATR thermal spectrum. This allows the experiment to reach a high burnup in an expeditious timeframe compared to traditional ATR fast fuel irradiations. In addition, problems with fabrication sensitivities were addressed by introducing a double-encapsulated experiment that pushes the high heat flux helium gap farther away from the fuel pin. Fuel pin position eccentricities are also mitigated by using a large sodium bond between the pin and capsule fuel. The advantages and potential pitfalls of this revised design are discussed, including the effect of length scales on fuel system behavior.