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.
Aditya Gour, Tom Mathews, R. P. Behera
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 7 | July 2023 | Pages 1040-1049
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2171664
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) offload modules play a crucial role in India’s first commercial fast breeder reactor (PFBR) distributed digital control system architecture by providing networking capabilities to the real-time control systems used in safety-critical and safety-related applications of the PFBR. These modules enable operators to remotely control various mechanisms, facilities, and process loops via real-time control systems from the main control room display stations. The malfunctioning of these modules may hamper the overall plant’s availability; hence to improve further upon safety, security, reliability, and performance, these modules have been indigenously developed for upcoming fast breeder reactors in India. This paper proposes methods to justify the suitability of these communication modules as per the D-25 design guidelines issued by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board of India.
The design and testing aspects are covered, including an approach toward hardware descriptive language-based design and testing with respect to the IEEE standard and the TCP/IP protocol specifications. Module design validation based on ethernet frame transactions is detailed in this paper. The test platform design, which includes the diagnostics software design for CPUs designed with these TCP offload modules, and the design of a graphical user interface to detect and record TCP connection anomalies are detailed. The network interface response to postulated events of TCP packet corruption, packet drop, packet delay, out-of-order packets, duplicate packets, and heavy traffic is characterized.
