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.

The Department of Energy announced recently it will provide more than $35 million for 42 projects to help move emerging energy technologies from DOE national laboratories, plants, and sites related to grid security, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing to the marketplace. The selected projects will leverage over $21 million in cost-share from private and public partners, bringing total funding to more than $57.5 million.

A full list of the FY2025 selections is available here.

Flowserve Corporation, headquartered in Irving, Texas, has “received official approval from the U.S. Department of Energy (10 CFR Part 810) to be able to manufacture safety-critical pumps for India’s new reactors at our Coimbatore, India facility,” according to a post on the company’s LinkedIn profile.

Rhoades

Mudrick

Longtime nuclear industry executive Chris Mudrick has been named the new chief nuclear officer at Constellation Energy, effective September 29. He will take over the position from Dave Rhoades, who is retiring from the role.

History: Mudrick has been Constellation’s senior vice president of generation growth since December 2024, a position that marked his return to the company after serving as executive vice president and CNO at Bruce Power in Ontario, Canada, for more than four years. Prior to joining Bruce Power, Mudrick was at Constellation/Exelon for more than 32 years, ending his time there as senior vice president of operations–East and chief operating officer. He began his career with the company as a nuclear power plant operator in Pennsylvania in 1987.

General Atomics last week celebrated the completion of the central solenoid modules for the ITER reactor being built in southern France. Designed to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power, the ITER tokamak will be the world’s largest experimental fusion facility.

Demonstrating the beneficial reuse of equipment among Department of Energy cleanup sites, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management transferred TRUPACT-III shipping equipment from its Savannah River Site in South Carolina to the Idaho Cleanup Project at the Idaho National Laboratory Site. This collaboration shows how DOE-EM drives efficiency, focusing on priorities and reining in costs without sacrificing safety or effectiveness, the DOE said.

Here is a recap of industry happenings from the recent past:

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Progress continues on ITER vacuum vessel construction

Westinghouse Electric Company has signed a $180 million contract with the ITER Organization for the assembly of ITER’s vacuum vessel. Westinghouse has been collaborating with ITER for more than a decade, including in the manufacturing of sectors for the tokamak device’s vacuum vessel, in cooperation with its partners in the AMW consortium, Ansaldo Nucleare and Walter Tosto. After all the vacuum vessel sectors are in place, Westinghouse plans to simultaneously weld the nine sectors to form one circular ring-shaped torus.

The American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) held a webinar recently exploring the security aspects of floating and offshore nuclear power.

Moderator Shikha Prasad, CEO of Srijan LLC and immediate past chair of the NNPD, began the discussion by recapping the recent exponential growth in the field and its future economic potential before introducing the presenters, each of whom spoke about the work they and their organizations are doing to advance the field.

Below are brief summaries of each speaker’s presentation. To see their thoughts and the ensuing Q&A, click here.

The Tennessee Valley Authority and Houston, Texas–based energy production company Entra1 Energy recently announced the signing of an agreement to collaborate on the deployment of six new nuclear power plants equipped with NuScale small modular reactors.

Kairos Power and BWX Technologies announced today that they will work together to “collaboratively explore” optimizing commercial production of TRISO fuel for Kairos’s planned advanced reactor fleet—beginning with the 50-MWe Hermes 2, slated for operation in 2030—and other potential customers. Their collaboration could include jointly developing a TRISO fuel fabrication facility.

Canadian uranium provider Cameco calculated an end-of-August spot price for uranium of $75.13—up from the previous month’s spot price of $71.10. Cameco continues to list a long-term price of $81.00 for August and has set it at $80.00 or $81.00 all year.

Eight days after Aalo Atomics released the details of its securing of $100 million in Series B funding, the company announced that it has broken ground on the 50-MWe Aalo-X. Sited in the desert beside Idaho National Laboratory, it will be the company’s first nuclear power plant, and it remains on track to go on line by July 4, 2026.

Hoping to tackle a growing global demand for energy, The Open Group, a vendor-neutral technology and standards membership organization, has announced the formation of the Industrial Advanced Nuclear Consortium (IANC) to collaborate on finding advanced nuclear energy solutions to serve industrial customers.

Introduction

The nuclear energy industry is critical not only for meeting the world’s growing demand for electricity but also for advancing global decarbonization goals. As the sector evolves—through life extensions of existing plants, decommissioning, innovations like small modular reactors (SMRs) and microreactors, and new facility construction—the need for safe, efficient, and environmentally responsible maintenance and decommissioning continues to grow. Whether a plant is coming online, operating beyond its original design life, or entering decommissioning, cleanliness and operational integrity remain non-negotiable. That’s where dry ice blasting stands out—a powerful, safe cleaning method ideally suited for the high-stakes demands of nuclear environments.

After the Trump administration’s new push to get a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030 was first reported by Politico last month, media played up the shock value for people new to the concept. Few focused on the technical details of the new plan for lunar fission surface power (FSP), which halts and replaces a program that began under the first Trump administration with an early hope of getting a reactor on the moon by the end of 2026. Now, the focus is on streamlining NASA’s internal processes to support commercial space companies that can build a reactor with more than twice the power and mass and have it ready for launch by 2030.

Bangladesh Limited, the company that will operate the two-unit Rooppur nuclear power plant once it reaches commercial operation, is committed to enhancing the plant’s operational safety, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found that the environmental impacts of renewing the operating licenses of the Peach Bottom and Browns Ferry nuclear power plants for an additional 20 years are not great enough to prohibit doing so. If renewed, the licenses will allow the plants to operate for up to 80 years.

As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.

In May, the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Greifswald, Germany, concluded an experimental campaign by sustaining a plasma with a high triple product for 43 seconds. The machine far surpassed its own previous performance with a value that the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) says “exceeds previous tokamak records for long plasma durations”—in part because of a fuel pellet injection system developed by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Watch ORNL’s video of that fuel pellet injection system—in use since September 2024—as it extrudes a column of frozen hydrogen and then cuts individual 3.2-millimeter-long pellets. The process, which takes just half a millisecond, was captured in slow motion by ORNL engineer Steve Meitner.

The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) has held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series. Former RP3C chair N. Prasad Kadambi opened the meeting with brief introductory remarks about the RP3C and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods. He then welcomed this month’s speaker: Kent Welter, a member of the ANS Standards Board and chief engineer of testing and analysis at NuScale, who presented “RIPB Design and Licensing of the NuScale US460 Small Modular Reactor.”

Watch the full webinar here.