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.
N. H. Balshaw, Y. Krivchenkov, G. Phillips, S. Davis, R. Pampin-Garcia
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 661-665
ITER | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8984
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Many of the ITER diagnostic systems will be mounted in the equatorial and upper ports of the torus, supported plugs support the diagnostics and provide functions of baking, cooling, and neutron shielding. They must operate reliably in the demanding ultra-high vacuum, high radiation environment of the ITER tokamak for many years.Recent work on the mechanical design of the equatorial port plugs is reported, including a proposal for a new conceptual design, which uses the lid of the port plug as a structural member. The design of a complex component like this is an iterative process considering the interaction of the features of the port plug structure, neutron shielding components and diagnostic components with the electromagnetic forces induced in the structure by plasma disruptions.These electromagnetic forces are recognised to dominate the requirements for the strength of the structure. Much work has been carried out on this topic by other people, but generally this has been based on models which make assumptions about the boundary conditions. An ANSYS electromagnetic model of a half-sector of ITER has now been developed by UKAEA, to study the induced forces in the equatorial port plugs.
