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.
L. El-Guebaly, P. Wilson, M. Sawan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1027-1031
Technical Paper | Tritium, Safety, and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1630
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The main goal of this assessment is to classify the radwaste stream of the recyclable transmission lines (RTL) at the end of the Z-Pinch plant operation. With the emergence of the new clearance standards, we included both the national and international standards in our analysis and assessed the implications for the RTL waste stream. The 3-D spectral flux was coupled to the ALARA pulsed activation code to estimate the activation responses. Our results indicate that for the first time an internal component close to the target, such as the RTL, can be cleared from regulatory control following a storage period of 50 y after plant decommissioning. As a design requirement, the recycling process must be economically feasible, accomplished within 1.1 day with no hands-on manufacturing and in the absence of personnel access to the fabrication facility. Advanced remote handling equipment must be developed to handle a dose rate of 3000 Sv/h.