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.
Diana Schroen, Dan Goodin, Jared Hund, Reny Paguio, Barry McQuillan, Jonathan Streit
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 468-472
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology: Targets and Chambers | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1532
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The baseline design for the laser-driven Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) target is a 4.6 mm foam capsule with a polymer overcoat of 1 to 5 microns. The specifications for this overcoat include surface finish, permeation properties, uniform wall thickness and conformal coating of the foam shell. Many of these specifications are not unlike the full density polymer National Ignition Facility targets, but the foam shell adds to the fabrication difficulty. Since the foam surface is composed of open cells, creating the overcoat by typical vacuum deposition processes would start by replicating the foam surface making it very difficult to achieve the required surface specification. Instead an overcoat is made using interfacial polymerization at the edge of the foam surface. This is done by filling the foam shell with an organic solvent containing one reactant, then placing the shell into water containing another reactant. The reaction occurs only at the interface of the two solutions.This technique was pioneered at the Institute of Laser Engineering (Osaka University) with 0.8 mm diameter methacrylate shells. The process was later extended to 0.9 mm diameter resorcinol-formaldehyde and divinyl benzene (DVB) shells. For the High Average Power Laser Program target we need to extend the process to 4.6 mm diameter DVB foam shells. The properties of the DVB foam and the larger diameter of the shell make it more difficult to produce a gas tight shell. This report will explain how we are adapting the process and the results to date.