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.
M. M. Balkey, R. D. Day, S. H. Batha, N. E. Elliot, T. Pierce, D. L. Sandoval, K. P. Garrard, A. Sohn
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 2 | March 2004 | Pages 107-112
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A435
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Shock waves generated during inertial confinement fusion implosions propagate toward the center of the capsule encountering interfaces between materials with different densities, such as between the ablator and the DT fuel. These interactions are hydrodynamically unstable and the resulting instability causes mixing of the materials at the interface, which is predicted to have detrimental effects on fusion burn. In this experiment, the growth of a single-mode perturbation machined into a radiographically opaque marker layer, driven by a strong shock, is measured during a cylindrically symmetric implosion. These measurements are used to validate simulations and theories of the complex hydrodynamics. Since any perturbation on the marker layer surface will lead to instability growth, precise knowledge of the initial conditions is critical. The targets used in this experiment have up to a 3.0-m-amplitude, mode 28 ( = 98 m) sinusoidal perturbation machined into a 438-m-outerradius aluminum band with a nominal thickness of 8 m. The perturbations were machined using a fast-tool servo [B. JARED and T. A. DOW, Precision Engineering Center Annual Report, North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC, p. 123 (1996)] and were metrologized using a linear variable differential transformer [FRANK J. OLIVER, Practical Instrumentation Tranducers, p. 42-45, Hayden Book Company (1971)]. In this paper, the importance of metrology is discussed and is shown to be critical to the interpretation of experimental results.