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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.
Marica Eboli, Alessandro Del Nevo, Nicola Forgione, Fabio Giannetti, Daniele Mazzi, Marco Ramacciotti
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 9 | September 2020 | Pages 1409-1420
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1749480
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the framework of the European Union MAXSIMA project, the safety of the steam generator (SG) adopted in the primary loop of the Heavy Liquid Metal Fast Reactor has been studied investigating the consequences and damage propagation of a SG tube rupture event and characterizing leak rates from typical cracks. Instrumentation able to promptly detect the presence of a crack in the SG tubes may be used to prevent its further propagation, which would lead to a full rupture of the tube. Application of the leak-before-break concept is relevant for improving the safety of a reactor system and decreasing the probability of a pipe break event. In this framework, a new experimental campaign (Test Series C) has been carried out in the LIFUS5/Mod3 facility, installed at ENEA Centro Ricerche Brasimone, in order to characterize and to correlate the leak rate through typical cracks occurring in the pressurized tubes with signals detected by proper transducers. Test C1.3_60 was executed injecting water at about 20 bars and 200°C into lead-bismuth eutectic alloy. The injection was performed through a laser microholed plate 60 μm in diameter. Analysis of the thermohydraulic data permitted characterization of the leakage through typical cracks that can occur in the pressurized tubes of the SG. Analysis of the data acquired by microphones and accelerometers highlighted that it is possible to correlate the signals to the leakage and the rate of release.
