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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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!
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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.
Joseph D. Kotulski, Rebecca S. Coats
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 438-442
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-114
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ITER blanket system provides shielding of the plasma controlling field coils and vacuum vessel from the plasma heat flux as well as nuclear heating from the plasma. In addition to the thermal requirements the blanket module attachment scheme must withstand the electromagnetic forces that occur during possible plasma disruption events. During a plasma disruption event eddy currents are induced in the blanket module (first wall and shield block) and interact with the large magnetic fields to produce forces which could potentially cause mechanical failure. For this reason the design and qualification of the ITER blanket system requires appropriate high-fidelity electromagnetic simulations that capture the physics of these disruption scenarios.
The key features of the analysis procedure will be described including the modeling of the geometry of the blanket modules and the plasma current during disruption.
The electromagnetic calculations are performed using the Opera-3d software. This software solves the transient 3D finite element problem from which the eddy currents are calculated. The electromagnetic loads due to these eddy currents are then calculated and translated to the local coordinate system of the blanket module of interest.