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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.
N. S. Klimov, V. A. Kurnaev, A. M. Zhitlukhin, D. V. Kovalenko, I. M. Poznyak, A. A. Moskacheva, D. B. Abramenko
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 34-39
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12402
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper concerns experimental investigations of metallic material erosion under the plasma heat loads expected in ITER divertor during transient events such as the type I edge-localized modes and the disruptions. Primary attention is focused on the erosion due to melt layer movement and splashing. The targets of tungsten and other metals were repeatedly exposed to hydrogen plasma flow of 0.5 ms duration in the heat load range of 0.2-4.5 MJ/m2 at the TRINITI plasma gun QSPA-T. The ejection of liquid droplets was observed during plasma exposure by special recoded system and onset conditions of droplets ejection were defined. Between some of the plasma pulses the eroded surface was analyzed with profilometry and microscopy. The mass loss and exposed surface profile were measured as a function of heat load and number of pulses. Experimentally measured target thinning due to melt layer removal from the exposed area to periphery was compared with erosion due to mass loss as a result of droplets ejection and evaporation. The obtained surface profile was compared with the result of numerical calculations which based on simultaneous solving of the 2-D heat conductivity equation and hydrodynamics equations of “shallow water” approximation.
