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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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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.
Satish Kumar Dhurandhar, S. L. Sinha, Shashi Kant Verma
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 5 | May 2020 | Pages 663-696
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1698257
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Flow and thermal performance analysis is an important area in the nuclear industry for the safe operation of reactors and the optimum design of fuel rod bundles with spacers in the reactor core. The spacer, an essential element in the nuclear fuel rod assembly, is used to support the fuel rods in the bundle and maintain suitable clearance between the rods. This paper represents a comprehensive review of the effects of spacer/mixing vane spacer on flow behavior and heat transfer performance in nuclear fuel rod bundles, annular channels, and circular tubes. This paper is based on the experimental and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) investigations performed by researchers in literature for both single-phase and two-phase fluid flow. In addition, the effects of some parameters, such as Reynolds number, hydraulic diameter, pitch-to-diameter ratio, blockage ratio, working fluid, and number of fuel rods in an assembly, on flow and thermal performance analysis have been reviewed. A detailed review has been carried out by considering both experimental and CFD methods used in the past for analysis of thermal-hydraulic performance in the fuel channels of nuclear reactors.
