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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.
Kunihiro Yamamoto, Zensaku Kawara, Tomoaki Kunugi, Takayoshi Norimatsu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 585-589
IFE Design & Technology | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12446
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To protect from high-energy fluxes caused by nuclear fusion reaction to a first wall of a laser-fusion reactor such as KOYO reactor, the cascade-type falling liquid-metal film flow was proposed as a liquid-wall concept which was one of the reactor chamber cooling and wall protection schemes. In this concept, vapor released by fuel targets and the liquid wall will be condensed on the chamber ceiling which is kept relatively cold. The condensed liquid-metal vapor makes many droplets on the ceiling, and then the droplets will agglomerate, and eventually make the liquid film on the ceiling surface. The liquid-metal film will flow from the ceiling to the liquid first-wall. In this study, the proof-of-principal (POP) experiments and numerical simulations were conducted regarding the liquid-film flow on the ceiling wall. It is found that if the liquid film is formed on the ceiling surface, the liquid flows along the ceiling wall and from the ceiling wall down to the reactor core as long as the vapor is supplied. Moreover, the measurements of the liquid-film thickness were taken by using a confocal laser scanning microscopy, and the effects of the wettability of the wall on the liquid film flow behavior were obtained.
