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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.
Xiaoling Yang et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 615-619
Alternate Concepts & Magnets | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12451
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A volumetrically-loaded ultra-high-density deuterium cluster material is described here for use as a deuteron beam source in laser matter interactions. Due to high volumetric loading, the material has potential to provide enough deuteron beam flux for the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) fuel ignition, avoiding depletion problem encountered by current proton-driven fast ignition (FI). In addition, accelerated deuterons can fuse with the ICF fuel (both D and T) to provide extra “bonus” energy gain, which further relaxes the laser-driver energy needed. Preliminary TRIDENT sub-Petawatt Laser experiments have provided some encouraging results showing that our cluster foils with a relative low packing fraction, can achieve a high yield of the accelerated deuterons even in the presence of an unwanted surface contaminant.
