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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.
M. J. Pattison, S. Smolentsev, R. Munipalli, M. A. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 809-813
Computational Tools, Modeling & Validation | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-309
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a Dual-Coolant Lead-Lithium (DCLL) blanket, tritium losses from the PbLi into cooling helium streams may occur when the liquid-metal breeder is moving in the poloidal ducts. Quantitative analysis of the mass transfer processes associated with the tritium transport in the breeder as well as tritium diffusion through the structural and functional materials is important for two main reasons. The first is that there can be a substantial cost in extracting tritium from helium. The second is that tritium can make its way from the helium stream into the environment. In the present study, we analyze tritium transport in the front section of the DCLL DEMO-type Outboard blanket, where PbLi moves poloidally in a rectangular duct with an insulating flow channel insert (FCI) in the presence of a strong plasma-confining magnetic field. This involves two steps, the computation of the flow field with an MHD code, followed by the solution of the mass transfer equation with a newly-developed transport code CATRYS. The analyses included a sensitivity study to investigate how uncertainties in the properties of the materials (diffusion coefficient, solubility constant) affect the results and to assess the effect of an impervious crystalline sealing layer on the FCI.