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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.
J. D. Kotulski, R. S. Coats, M. F. Pasik, M. Ulrickson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 272-277
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/FST11-A12364
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ITER device is based on the tokamak concept of magnetic confinement in which the plasma is contained by the use of strong magnetic fields. The nearest structure to the plasma is the blanket system which provides shielding to the vacuum vessel and the superconducting magnets. There are potential abnormal operating environments where the plasma currents inside the tokamak are disrupted and induce eddy currents in the blanket (first wall and shield module). These currents interact with the large magnetic fields to produce forces in the blanket which could potentially cause mechanical failure in the first wall, shield module, or vacuum vessel. For this reason the design and qualification of the ITER blanket system requires appropriate high-fidelity electromagnetic simulations that capture the physics of these disruption scenarios.A number of different geometries will be discussed revealing the effect of different first wall designs and shield modules on the forces and torques experienced by these assemblies during plasma disruption.The key features of the modeling procedure will be presented including the plasma current modeling and geometric modeling of the first wall, shield modules, and vacuum vessel. The eddy current calculation is performed using the Opera-3d software.