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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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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 THD
Wednesday, November 12, 2025|1:00–2:45PM EST|Room 7
Session Chair:
Izabela Gutowska
Session Organizer:
Alternate Chair:
Drew M. Ryan
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Visual-Acoustic Boiling Data Driven Machine Learning for Isotope Production
1:00–1:20PM EST
Pei-Hsun Huang (LANL), Jee Hyun Seong (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology), Jonathan M. Castro-Aguilar (LANL), Ellen M. O'Brien (LANL), Christiaan E. Vermeulen (LANL)
Paper
A Physics-Informed Neural Network Approach for Reliable Surrogate Modeling for PWR LOOP Accidents
1:20–1:40PM EST
Fabiano Thulu (Young Members Group), Zeyun Wu (Virginia Commonwealth University), Yunfei Zhao (University of Maryland at College Park)
Transformer-Based Deep-Learning Turbulence Modeling for Coarse-Mesh Reactor Simulations
1:40–2:00PM EST
Eric Cervi (Argonne National Laboratory), Alexandre Millischer (Argonne National Laboratory), Ling Zou (Argonne National Laboratory), Rui Hu (Argonne National Laboratory)
Development and Deployment of Hybrid ML Models for Critical Heat Flux Prediction in Annulus Geometries
2:00–2:20PM EST
Aidan J. Furlong (North Carolina State University), Xingang Zhao (University of Tennessee Knoxville), Robert K. Salko (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Xu Wu (North Carolina State University)
Aggregation of Published Non-Uniform Axial Power Data for Phase II of the OECD/NEA AI/ML Critical Heat Flux Benchmark
2:20–2:40PM EST
Reece Bourisaw (Kansas State University), Reid McCants (Kansas State University), Jean-Marie Le Corre (Westinghouse Electric Sweden AB), Anna Iskhakova (Kansas State University), Arsen Iskhakov (Kansas State University)
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