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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.
Tetsuya Mouri, Masayuki Naganuma, Shigeo Ohki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 4 | April 2023 | Pages 532-548
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2133514
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper deals with a conceptual study on a plutonium (Pu) and minor actinide (MA) burning fast reactor core for the distant future phaseout of a fast reactor fuel cycle after it is commercialized and used for a long time. This burning core aims to reduce the Pu and MA inventories contained in the fuel cycle through multiple recycling. A key point for the core design is the degradation of Pu and MAs during multiple recycling. This degradation affects the feasibility of the nuclear design by increasing the sodium void reactivity and decreasing the absolute value of the Doppler constant. A feasible core concept was found by incorporating the following three factors to improve the reactivity coefficients: core geometry flattening, fuel burnup reduction, and use of silicon carbide (SiC) in the cladding and wrapper tubes. Notably, softening the neutron spectrum using the SiC structural material not only improved the reactivity coefficients but also indirectly mitigated the degradation of Pu and MAs. Consequently, the designed core allowed for multiple recycling to continue until the Pu and MAs reduced significantly, particularly by about 99% in a phaseout scenario starting from a fast reactor fleet of 30-GWe nuclear power capacity. Fast reactors were found to have the potential to become self-contained energy systems that can minimize the inventories of Pu they produced themselves, as well as long-lived MAs. Fast reactors can be among the important options for environmental burden reduction in the future.