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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
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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Sep 2025
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
Latest News
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.
Technical Session|Sponsored by MCD
Wednesday, November 12, 2025|3:15–5:00PM EST|Room 12
Session Chair:
Koroush Shirvan
Session Organizer:
Alternate Chair:
Majdi I. Radaideh
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Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs for Zero-Shot Classification of Two-Phase Flows in Nuclear Reactors
3:15–3:35PM EST
Polina Matesha (Bio Sensing Research Group, Research Institute of Science and Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab), Bassam A. Khuwaileh (University of Sharjah)
Paper
Progress on a Representativity Study of a RELAP5-3D Model of the High Temperature Test Facility
3:35–3:55PM EST
Jonathan L. Barthle (University of Tennessee Knoxville), Aaron S. Epiney (Idaho National Laboratory), Robert Kile (Idaho National Laboratory), Nicholas R. Brown (University of Tennessee Knoxville)
Satellite-Based Explainable Deep Learning as an Option to Assure Robust Remote Performance Monitoring in Deployment Scenarios for SMRs and Microreactors
3:55–4:15PM EST
Hui-Yu Hsieh (TAMU), Thabit M. Abuqudaira (TAMU), Pavel V. Tsvetkov (TAMU)
Propagating Time-Dependent Stochastic Uncertainty via Depletion Sensitivity Coefficients in OpenMC
4:15–4:35PM EST
Sydney A. Dowben (Univ. New Mexico), Benjamin Murphy (Univ. New Mexico), Christopher Perfetti (Univ. New Mexico)
Uncertainty Reduction Driven Optimal Sensor Selection in Nuclear Waste Recycling Plant Design
4:35–4:55PM EST
Scott Evans (GE Vernova Advanced Research), Hao Huang (GE Vernova Advanced Research), Helena Goldfarb (GE Vernova Advanced Research), Arun Subramanian (GE Vernova Advanced Research), Sachini Piyoni Ekanayake (GE Vernova), Philip Honnold (Sandia National Lab), Nathan T. Shoman (Sandia National Lab), Peter Koudal (GE Aerospace Research), Dan Yang (GE Aerospace Research), Nick Abate (GE Aerospace Research), John Carbone (GE Aerospace Research), Ross F. Radel (SHINE Technologies)
Preliminary Implementation of a Generalized Perturbation Theory-Based Sensitivity Calculation Capability in Griffin
4:55–5:15PM EST
Seoyoon Jeon (Argonne National Laboratory), Yaqi Wang (Idaho National Laboratory), Changho Lee (Argonne National Laboratory), Hansol Park (Argonne National Laboratory)
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