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.
S. G. Durbin, M. Yoda, S. I. Abdel-Khalik, D. L. Sadowski, T. P. Koehler, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 16-26
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A595
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The "hydrodynamic source term" has been identified as a possible issue for thick liquid protection schemes in inertial fusion energy reactor cavities. The hydrodynamic source term refers to the ejected droplets due to the primary turbulent breakup of the jets themselves. Droplets are continuously ejected from the surface of the jets and spread about the chamber, possibly interfering with driver propagation and target injection. Published correlations are examined in order to estimate upper limits for the hydrodynamic source term in the case of the robust point design (RPD-2002), an update to the High-Yield Lithium Injection Fusion Energy II (HYLIFE-II) design. Experimental data for vertical turbulent sheets of water issuing into ambient air downward from nozzles of thickness (small dimension) = 1 cm and aspect ratio of 10 are compared with the empirical correlations at near-prototypical Reynolds numbers of 1.3 × 105. A simple mass collection technique was developed to estimate the amount of ejected droplets from the jet surface. Boundary layer cutting is examined as a means of reducing the source term and improving surface smoothness. Alternate flow conditioning schemes are also explored to establish the relative importance of "traditional" flow straightening elements. Planar laser-induced fluorescence was used to visualize the free-surface geometry of the liquid sheet in the near-field region up to 25 downstream of the nozzle exit. These results indicate that boundary layer cutting can suppress the hydrodynamic source term for a well-conditioned jet but is not a substitute for proper flow conditioning.