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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Pedro Mena, R. A. Borrelli, Leslie Kerby
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 232-245
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1905470
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Artificial intelligence is becoming a larger part of operations for many industries. One industry where this is occurring rapidly is the nuclear industry. Researchers from around the world are looking to implement this technology in various areas of the nuclear industry. This paper explores the use of machine learning to diagnose problems. This project makes use of synthetic data collected from a Generic Pressurized Water Reactor (GPWR) simulator on whether a reactor is operating normally or experiencing one of four different transient events. A dataset was created consisting of over 30 000 reactor operational states. The data were explored and wrangled using Python and the Pandas package, using a variety of methods. Once ready, the data were randomly shuffled, with half the data being used for training and the other half being used for testing. Six different machine learning models were created using scikit-learn and the AutoML package Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool (TPOT). These models were created using six data scaling methods along with six feature reduction/selection methods. These models were validated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The accuracy of the individual transients was also calculated. All six of the models had validation scores above 95%, with the decision tree and logistic regression models performing the best. These results are promising for the possible future use of machine learning in reactor diagnostics.