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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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.
I. Tazhibayeva, I. Lyublinski, A. Vertkov, V. Lazarev, E. Azizov, G. Mazzitelli, P. Agostini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 554-557
Blanket Design and Experiments | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12441
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The objective of this work is to carry out the tests of the KTM tokamak lithium divertor model as well as develop recommendations on the use of lithium technologies in tokamak-reactors. Li-technology will be developed and a Na-K cooled KTM tokamak lithium divertor module will be designed and tested as a result of the project completion. It will be possible to operate the renewed lithium surface module under specific heat loads from 2 to 10 MW/m2 while in a quasi-stationary mode, discharge duration of up to ~5 s. The technical project proposal; design scheme and sketches; and procedure development for preparation, protection, cleaning and rehabilitation of lithium CPS (capillary-porous system) surfaces in tokamak conditions have been completed. The design substantiation calculations; technique development for lithium handling in tokamak conditions; and confirming experiments on T-11M tokamak to prove the procedures developed are still in a progress. The study of both the lithium influence on the KTM plasma discharge parameters and specific power load on the plasma facing components as well as the selection of optimum operational modes of the lithium divertor will be accomplished after completion of the start-up and adjustment tests of the KTM tokamak divertor demonstration models.
