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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
A. K. Knight, D. R. Harding
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 728-736
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1193
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Vapor deposited PMDA-ODA poly(amic acid) and polyimide capsules have been produced with desirable material properties (high tensile strength, permeability, and elastic modulus), but the contributions of the process steps and their dependence on external control variables has not been investigated. We have combined numerical simulations with experimental measurements to model the steps of the vapor deposition process including monomer sublimation, vapor transport to the bounce pan, and poly-condensation on the substrate surfaces. The measured sublimation rates of PMDA and ODA monomer at temperatures that yielded stoichiometric poly(amic acid) (10-6 Torr deposition) are 1.2 × 10-7 gm/s PMDA (at 153° C) and 6.3 × 10-10 gm/s ODA (at 126° C) - a 180:1 PMDA:ODA molar ratio. These provide initial boundary conditions to simulate the thermal environment and vapor transport inside the deposition chamber at 1 × 10-2 Torr. A disproportionate loss of PMDA gas during transport to a stationary mandrel is shown by the numerical model to reduce the monomer stoichiometry to 9:1 PMDA:ODA. The transport-based loss depends strongly on the geometry of the substrate support, as is shown by modifying the substrate to change the flow pattern, which reduces this ratio to 1:1 PMDA:ODA above the mandrel. A separate model of the kinetics of monomer deposition and polymerization reactions was developed to correlate the gas concentrations above the substrate with the elemental concentrations comprising the film. This basic model was tested with rate constants based on reaction probabilities of one and equal deposition rates for two monomers in the absence of measured values and is sensitive to changes in vapor stoichiometry.