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.
A. Wojenski, K. Pozniak, G. Kasprowicz, W. Zabolotny, A. Byszuk, P. Zienkiewicz, M. Chernyshova, T. Czarski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 3 | May 2016 | Pages 595-604
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-189
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work refers to the measurement system for soft-X-ray radiation (SXR) diagnostics using gaseous electron multiplier (GEM) detectors. In terms of tokamak plasma parameter control and optimization, it is important to determine the level of SXR generated by plasma. This work describes the whole system including the GEM detector, electronic modules, and data acquisition (DAQ) path. The structure of the DAQ system is presented in terms of hardware, firmware, and software architecture. The currently developed hardware allows sampling of the GEM detector signals with 125-MHz frequency and real-time field-programmable gate array (FPGA) processing. It enables processing of all events generated by the highest possible photon flux for the GEM detector. The developed FPGA firmware registers digitized GEM detector signals with a global trigger up to 625 kHz with all 64 channels sampling simultaneously and stores them in the local memory. Therefore, it makes it possible to obtain the photon energy spectra at high photon flux (105 to 106 counts · mm−2 · s−1) in online acquisition mode. The software block performs a DAQ system start-up configuration and provides the user interface. The first preliminary results of laboratory tests are also presented.
