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.
D. C. Leslie, A. Jonsson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 23 | Number 3 | November 1965 | Pages 272-290
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE23-03-272
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method of calculating first-flight collision probabilities in cluster geometry is developed. The method is analytic and approximate and is comparable in speed to codes now available for annular geometry. The proposed scheme is based on a consideration of the properties of the nonescape probability from a nonuniform body in the limits of high and low macroscopic cross sections, together with an interpolation procedure that allows one to determine the probability itself with sufficient accuracy. When calculated for combinations of different rings of fuel pins in a cluster, the resulting set of nonescape probabilities enables one to proceed to a determination of the probability of going from one ring to another. The coolant and the fuel pins are treated separately. Results of the method are compared with exact calculations on two fuel-element types of current interest. In these cases the form factor, defined as the ratio of maximum to mean flux in the cluster, is in error by at most 2%. The hyperfine structure in each ring (i.e. the ratio of the mean flux in the coolant to the mean flux in the fuel) is calculated with comparable accuracy. A one-group calculation on a 37-rod fuel element takes approximately 5 sec on an IBM-7090, so that the method is certainly usable for multigroup applications.