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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Aaron T. Aoyama, Shahram Sharafat, Nasr Ghoniem, Mohamad Dagher, Clement Wong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 170-174
ITER Systems | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12347
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The US Fusion Nuclear Science and Technology program selected the Dual Coolant Lead Lithium (DCLL) concept as the primary Test Blanket Module (TBM) for testing in ITER. The DCLL blanket concept has the potential to be a high-performance DEMO blanket design with a projected thermal efficiency of >40%. Reduced activation ferritic/martensitic (RAF/M) steel is the structural material, helium is used to cool the first wall and blanket structure, and the self-cooled Pb-17Li breeder is circulated for power conversion and tritium extraction.The DCLL TBM has undergone major design changes since 2005. We present here the most recent thermo-mechanical analysis of the newly revised DCLL TBM. The analysis described here is aiming to verify the thermo-mechanical response of the DCLL TBM under relevant normal operating conditions as well as during a loss of coolant accident (LOCA).A full 3-dimensional solid model of the entire DCLL TBM structure was developed, which included FW, top and bottom lids, internal supporting ribs, manifolds, plena, and flexible frame-attachment supports. A coupled thermo-mechanical analysis was performed for both normal- and off-normal operating conditions. Thermal loads included surface heat load, volumetric heating, as well as detailed position- and location dependent heat transfer along all coolant channels. Structural loads incorporated helium coolant pressure loads, self-weight, as well as the weight of the PbLi. Maximum structure temperatures of nearly 560 °C along with a maximum resultant net displacement of more than 10 mm were mapped for normal operating conditions and a number of stress concentration locations were identified. The ITER SDC-IC-1300 criteria were applied to the LOCA analysis results. It is shown that the DCLL TBM exhibits admissible behavior regarding the ITER Design Criteria and that the most recent design modifications did not compromise the structural integrity.
