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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.
X. M. Yuan, H. G. Yang, W. W. Zhao, Q. Zhan, Y. Hu, TMT Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1065-1068
Contamination and Waste | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12600
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a fusion blanket design, ceramic coating such as Al2O3, Er2O3, Y2O3, TiC, TiN and TiC/TiN etc., has been considered as a tritium permeation barrier (TPB) on structural materials (e.g. RAFMs, 316L) by many countries in the past 20 years. The Al2O3 film prepared by in-situ oxidation of the iron aluminide layer is considered one of the most attractive because of the slow-growing steady protective oxide scale and its excellent self-healing ability. In order to obtain a transition aluminide layer with a certain aluminum content and thickness on two kinds of substrates such as the Reduced Activation Ferritic/Martensitic (RAFM) and 316L stainless steel, wide research efforts have been made on the effect of different pack chemistry, temperature and time on the properties and thickness of the aluminizing layers. The results indicated that a dense and uniform coating with a thickness about 20m was formed on CLAM (a Chinese RAFM steel) and 316L substrates for the pack material with low Al content (about 32wt.%). This aluminide coating had a surface aluminum content about 40-50at.% and was mainly consisted of ductile FeAl phase. For the pack material with high Al content (about 50wt.%), the thickness and the surface aluminum content of the aluminizing coating had great increases and there were mainly brittle Fe2Al5 phase. Especially some cracks were observed across this coating on CLAM substrate due to the mismatch in coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) between the coating and substrate.
