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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
Sunday, July 20, 2025|1:00–5:00PM EDT
Gulf Room
Emerging Technologies for Fuel Management Application: Optimization of Core Designs using Artificial Intelligence
Price: $49
Organizers: Westinghouse/INL
Time: 4 hrs total, 1 hr ACE and 2.5 hr RAVEN and 0.5 hr both presenters discuss comparison of surrogate modeling techniques and GA for this application.
This will be a highly interactive demonstration, but the participants will not be able to run the codes due to license complications. So, they are welcome to bring laptops if they want to download the open source Raven code as example, but they won’t have access to the nodal simulation codes to be able to actually generate any LPs.
Introduction to RAVEN: RAVEN is a multi-purpose stochastic platform that integrates uncertainty propagation, machine learning, optimization, and data analysis methods, and it provides a unique language to apply these methods to user-provided simulation models. With RAVEN, users can create customizable statistical analysis/optimization workflows where the response of simulation models is explored (e.g., for uncertainty propagation, model optimization, model calibration and model validation) for a variety of initial and operating conditions and the resulting data can be analyzed using machine learning, data mining and artificial intelligence algorithms. RAVEN orchestrates these machine learning/digital twinning pipelines on multiple operating systems and hardware configurations, ranging from laptops to high performance computing (HPC) environments. RAVEN also provides a plug-in interface that has already been leveraged by many system analysis and design tools, which enable simple multi-code integration across simulation tools.
An overview of the software is available at https://github.com/idaholab/raven/wiki
The software is open source and can be downloaded at: https://github.com/idaholab/raven
Training Objectives: The first objective is to provide a general understanding of the RAVEN package and its main capabilities. Second, a series of practical examples will be provided in ascending level of complexity, starting from the simplest statistical analysis to the generation of the complex machine learning models and their utilization in system analysis and uncertainty quantification. Third, the system optimization, especially, plant fuel reload optimization with genetic algorithms will be covered. This training section will include a theoretical/code usage overview of the subject capability and demonstrations. If the attendees would like to try some demonstrations, we recommend the attendees have their own laptop ready and follow the installation procedures provided in https://pypi.org/project/raven-framework/ before the workshop.
Detailed agenda will be provided as we come closer to the workshop date.
