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.
X. R. Wang, M. S. Tillack, C. Koehly, S. Malang, H. H. Toudeshki, F. Najmabadi, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 193-219
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-798
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ARIES-ACT2 is a conventional tokamak power plant conceptual design that uses a dual-coolant lead-lithium (DCLL) blanket concept with a RAFS (reduced-activation ferritic steel) first-wall (FW) and blanket structure. The design concept is the first fully integrated study of the DCLL blanket in a tokamak power plant. The major engineering efforts were to develop a credible configuration that can meet aggressive maintenance goals and achieve high availability and maintainability; to design a DCLL blanket that can meet tritium breeding requirements with reasonable helium and Pb-17Li cooling schemes to remove the surface and volumetric thermal power in the blanket while keeping the helium pressure drop, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) pressure drop, and total pumping power low, and material temperatures and stresses at an acceptable level; to design manifolding and access pipes to connect/disconnect the inboard and outboard blanket sectors to the ring headers located underneath the reactor without affecting maintenance operations and creating major MHD effects when feeding all the Pb-17Li/He mass flow. Detailed three-dimensional finite element analysis of the DCLL blankets together with design iterations have been performed to finalize and optimize the major design parameters of the FW and blanket structure. The helium-cooled W plate-type divertor concept was adopted and integrated into the ACT2 DCLL power core to accommodate the peak surface heat flux of ∼10 MW/m2 predicted by edge plasma physics.