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.
Suk-Kwon Kim et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 161-164
ITER Systems | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12345
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Korean standard mockups with beryllium tile were fabricated to perform the high heat flux test for the qualification test of ITER blanket first wall. These mockups include the 80 mm × 80 mm beryllium armor tiles joined to the CuCrZr heat sink with stainless steel cooling tubes by HIP (Hot Isostatic Pressing) technology. The high heat flux tests were performed in the Korea heat load test facility (KoHLT-1) with the averaged surface heat flux of 1.25 MW/m2 by using a graphite heater. Preliminary thermal and mechanical analyses were carried out to simulate the test conditions and to determine the number of cycles for the fatigue lifetime of the mockups. In our KoHLT-1 facility, the normal heat cycle was based on an expected heat flux of 1.25 MW/m2, and each mockup had to endure the 1,000 normal heat cycles in this heat flux in accordance with the mechanical simulation. In the cyclic heat flux tests, the maximum surface temperature of the beryllium tiles was controlled below 400 °C. As a result of these high heat flux tests with the acceptance criteria of the ITER blanket first wall, the manufacturing technologies of the Korean standard mockups will be utilized to develop the tokamak blanket for the international qualification procedure.