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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.
Q. Qi, X. F. Wang, L. Q. Shi, L. Zhang, B. Zhang, Y. F. Lu, A. Liu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1483-1486
Interaction with Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Helium atoms are introduced into Cu films at room temperature by direct current (DC) magnetron sputtering in a He/Ar mixed atmosphere. The doped helium atoms are distributed evenly in the film and the content can be easily controlled by changing the process parameters. The structure of Cu films with trapped helium was investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD) technology. With increasing helium irradiation flux, the lattice spacing and width of diffraction peaks increased due to helium effects, corresponding to the increase of finite and infinite size defects in the film. The shape of thermal desorption spectrum (TDS) and the number of peaks strongly depended on the amount of helium introduced into Cu. With increase of helium content, helium release temperature decreases. At the same amount of helium, the peak temperature became higher with increase of heating rate and from this we can obtain a picture which could calculate the activation energy of helium desorption.
