ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
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.
T. N. Carlstrom
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 997-1010
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Achieving Reactor Quality Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1055
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
DIII-D contributions to H-mode transition physics and power thresholds are reviewed. Two general approaches were pursued: (a) establishing scaling relations based on empirical observations and (b) acquiring a theoretical understanding of the physics of the transition. The interaction of experiment results and the development of theories over the early 1990s led to the highly successful and widely accepted model of shear suppression of turbulence by crossed electric and magnetic fields (E × B) as the cause of improved confinement in H-mode. Experimental studies have also examined parameters at the edge of the plasma in order to identify a control parameter for the transition and to test various theories of the transition. The effect of the direction of the [nabla]B drift on the H-mode power threshold is used as a tool to further understand the physics of the L-H transition. Results on DIII-D and other tokamaks have guided researchers to study turbulent generated flows as a possible trigger for the L-H transition. Access to H-mode is controlled by a power threshold, and it is important to predict the threshold for next-generation tokamaks. In addition to electron density and toroidal field dependencies, it is found that many other parameters affect the power threshold. Studies of plasma size, magnetic configuration, and neutral effects have been performed. DIII-D data have been used in an international tokamak database to help establish scaling relations to predict power thresholds in future devices.