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.
Yanzi Liu, Xuegang Zhang, Gang Zhang, Jianjun Jiang, Li Zhang, Hong Hu, Tao Qing, Yanhua Zou, Dan Yang, Liaozi Xi, Fan Tang, Ming Jia, Yiqian Wu, Zhiyao Liu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 74-93
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1733376
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The digital control system (DCS)+state-oriented procedure (SOP) system adopted by China’s Ling’ao Phase II nuclear power plant’s main control room requires changes to the cognitive process, behavior mode, and error mode while triggering new human factors. Therefore, in this paper we present a cognitive reliability model for the DCS+SOP system in the Ling’ao Phase II Nuclear Power Plant’s main control room and conduct a human reliability analysis. The model is based on the cognitive process with respect to considering the coordinator’s accident recovery effect and obtaining the method of calculating cognitive reliability. We determine impact factors for the three cognitive stages of the operator’s and the coordinator’s diagnosis, decision making, and operation. We obtain the operator’s and the coordinator’s weights for each process through an analytic hierarchy process. Using methods of simulation and analyzing the experiment data, we obtain revised coefficients for the cognitive reliability model. Additionally, the trend of the simulation curve indicates the rationality of the model. Finally, we provide an example based on the proposed cognitive reliability model. The process of analyzing the example demonstrates that this method provides a feasible analysis method for the cognitive reliability of the DCS+SOP system in the main control room.
