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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.
Kaichao Sun, David Carpenter, Michael Ames, Akshay J. Dave, Lin-Wen Hu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 6 | June 2020 | Pages 924-937
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1679564
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) Facility at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was officially restarted in 2017. In support of its restart project, investigations are taking place into the refurbishment and upgrade of TREAT’s experiment systems with modern technology. In considering augmenting the current TREAT instrumentation, a variety of miniature neutron and gamma sensors that may be able to operate in-core will be irradiated under steady-state and transient conditions. The TREAT instrumentation is typically calibrated at steady state below 100 kW. This power level features a thermal flux similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Reactor (MITR) at less than 100 kW. Low-power MITR operation was therefore chosen for initial instrumentation benchmarking. Following the MITR runs, the entire test assembly was shipped to INL. Shaped and temperature-limited transients were performed using TREAT’s M8-Calibration vehicle. A total of three test rounds has taken place, including two 1-week sessions at MITR and one 2-week session at TREAT. Overall, successful performance for the majority of the tested detectors is concluded under steady-state and transient conditions. These miniature sensors are capable of recognizing accurate full-width at half-maximum of the reactor pulse. However, compared to operation channels located at the TREAT biological shield, all in-core instrumentations show certain degrees of underestimation of the peak power magnitude.
