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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.
Y. Hirooka, T. Oishi, H. Sato, K. A. Tanaka
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 804-808
Computational Tools, Modeling & Validation | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12484
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Along with pellet implosions, the interior of an inertial fusion reactor will be exposed to intense and short pulse power fluxes, leading to materials ablation. Ablated materials will either collide with each other in the axis-of-symmetry region or be re-deposited elsewhere in the target chamber. The present work is intended to investigate the behavior of colliding ablation plasma plumes and that of materials re-deposition in hydrogenic atmosphere. Laser-ablation plasma plumes of carbon are set to collide with each other in a laboratory-scale experimental setup. Results indicate that carbon cluster ions are formed, including C2+ C3+ C4+ C5+ and C6+, some of which grow into aerosol in the form of micro/nano carbon structure. Also, it has been found that ablated carbon and hydrogen can form co-deposited layers with the H/C ratio, reaching the order of 0.1.
