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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.
T. D. Bohm, M. E. Sawan, B. Smith, P. P. H. Wilson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 698-702
Nuclear Analysis & Experiments | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12466
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ITER blanket modules (BM) are geometrically complex with many water coolant channels in a SS316 structure. Detailed mapping of nuclear heating, radiation damage, and helium production is an essential input to the design process. Previous high fidelity, high-resolution results calculated with the CAD based DAG-MCNP code revealed important heterogeneity effects on nuclear heating and helium production near steel/water interfaces. We carried out additional analysis for a simplified geometry to understand the reasons behind the observed peaking in the steel nuclear parameters at the interface with the water coolant. The results show that the peaking in nuclear heating is due to the softer neutron spectrum in the portion of steel adjacent to water which results in more gamma generation. Helium production peaking in steel adjacent to the water is due to the softer neutron spectrum which results in increased helium production primarily in B-10 impurities present in the SS316 in addition to a two-step reaction of low-energy neutrons with Ni.
