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.
R. Moreno, J. Vega, S. Dormido-Canto, A. Pereira, A. Murari, JET Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 2 | April 2016 | Pages 485-494
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-167
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Advanced Predictor of Disruptions (APODIS) has been working in the JET real-time network since the beginning of the ITER-like wall (ILW) campaigns. APODIS is a data-driven system based on a multilayer structure of Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifiers. APODIS was trained with JET data corresponding to carbon wall discharges between April 2006 and October 2009, without any retraining in spite of its use with metallic wall discharges. This paper has two main parts. First, APODIS disruption prediction capabilities are evaluated during the ILW run period from July 2013 to October 2014. The results obtained from these experimental campaigns (more than 1059 nondisruptive discharges and 390 nonintentional disruptions) showed 2.46% false alarms and 85.38% success rate. Taking into account that ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) will work with a similar wall to the current ILW at JET, the purpose of the second part of this study is to compare predictors trained with data from JET ILW campaigns. The high computational cost that APODIS training requires and the great performance of SVM have motivated the development of a one-layer SVM predictor. Therefore, an APODIS version and a simpler one-layer predictor have been compared. They have been trained with data between September 2011 and July 2012 (1036 nondisruptive discharges and 201 nonintentional disruptions) and tested with experimental data in the period July 2013 to October 2014 (1051 nondisruptive discharges and 390 nonintentional disruptions). The one-layer predictor shows slightly better results than the APODIS structure.
