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.
Ahmad Al Rashdan, Shawn St. Germain
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 8 | August 2019 | Pages 1062-1074
Rapid Communication – Special section on Big Data for Nuclear Power Plants | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1610637
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The operations and maintenance monitoring of nuclear power plants (NPPs) in the United States is reliant on manual activities supplying information to a human decision-making process. Several manually collected labor-intensive processes generate information that is not typically used beyond the intended target for collecting that information. The industry has recognized the benefits of both reducing labor-intensive tasks by automating them and increasing the fidelity of the information collected to enable advanced remote monitoring of NPPs using data-driven decision making. This requires developing new means to acquire data from the various data sources of an NPP. While some sources already exist in a digital form, others are collected manually, summarized through conclusive statements, or not collected at all. This paper describes 15 sources of data at an NPP and methods to migrate the data collection from a manual and analog data form to an automated and digital data form that increases the data fidelity in time and space. Three states of data collection methods are described for each data source. The states describe a base state for how the data are currently being collected, a modern state for a more efficient method of collecting data that has not yet been implemented, and a state of the art for an advanced method of collecting data that is not yet ready for deployment.
