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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. A. Haasz, J. W. Davis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 1 | July 2006 | Pages 58-67
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1220
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Both physical sputtering and chemical erosion take place in tokamaks. Physical sputtering occurs for all elements for incident particle energies greater than an energy threshold. For carbon targets the threshold difference for the three hydrogen isotopes is relatively small. In the energy range of 100 to 3000 eV, the physical sputtering yields are similar for D and T, and the H yields are lower by about a factor of 2 to 3. Chemical erosion studies of graphite due to H+ and D+ impact also show evidence of some isotopic effect - with the deuterium yield being larger. The isotopic yield ratios (D-yield/H-yield) observed in almost all of the chemical erosion measurements, including ion beams, laboratory plasma devices, and tokamaks, lie between 1 and 2. The recently measured chemical erosion yields due to tritium ions also fall in this range. (The notable exceptions are the mass-loss studies at the Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik in Garching, Germany, where for energies <100 eV, the isotopic yield ratio was seen to increase from 4 to 7 with decreasing energy.) A nominal value of 1.5 ± 0.5 is suggested as the most appropriate value for the D/H yield ratio. This is fully consistent with the square root of mass dependence proposed for the modeling of chemical erosion.