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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
S. Malang, M. Tillack, C. P. C. Wong, N. Morley, S. Smolentsev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 249-256
In-Vessel Components - FW, Blanket, Shield & VV | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-212
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid metal breeders such as Lithium or the eutectic Lead-Lithium alloy PbLi have the potential for attractive breeding blankets, especially if the liquid metal serves as breeder and coolant. However, cooling of first wall and blanket structure is a challenging task because the magnetic field degrades the heat transfer and can cause a really high pressure drop. To overcome these problems, dual coolant blankets with helium cooled FW/blanket structure and a self-cooled breeding zone had been proposed, with electrical insulation by ceramic-coatings or sandwich flow channel inserts. Such concepts are in principle simpler than helium cooled blankets, but the thermal efficiency is limited to ~35 % as in any helium cooled blankets with steel structure. A much higher efficiency up to about 45 % became feasible when the sandwich insulator was replaced by flow channel inserts (FCI) made of a SiC composite. This FCI serves as thermal insulator too, allowing an exit temperature of ~700° C, suitable for a BRAYTON cycle power conversion system.The subject of this paper is a description of the Lead-Lithium blanket development and the major improvements on the dual coolant Lead-Lithium (DCLL) blanket concept achieved in the US during the last 10 years.
