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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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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.
J. W. Coenen, B. Bazylev, S. Brezinsek, V. Philipps, T. Hirai, A. Kreter, J. Linke, G. Pintsuk, G. Sergienko, A. Pospieszczyk, T. Tanabe, Y. Ueda, U. Samm, The TEXTOR Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 2 | February 2012 | Pages 129-135
Technical Paper | First Joint ITER-IAEA Technical Meeting on Analysis of ITER Materials and Technologies | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13378
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Behavior and characteristics of tungsten materials under impinging high heat fluxes are investigated. Experiments with inertially - not actively - cooled samples have been carried out in the plasma edge of the TEXTOR tokamak to study the changes of material properties such as grain size and abundance of voids or bubbles. In addition, the effects of electron beam impact regarding subsequent W power handling have been studied in view of future devices.The parallel heat flux at the radial position in TEXTOR impinging on the plasma-facing components (PFCs) ranges around q[parallel] [approximately] 45 MW/m2 allowing samples to be exposed at an impact angle of 35 deg to 20 to 30 MW/m2. Melt layer motion perpendicular to the magnetic field is observed following a Lorentz force originating from thermoelectric emission of the hot W sample. Up to 3 g of molten W are redistributed forming hill-like structures at the plasma-connected edge of the sample. The typical melt layer thickness is 1.0 to 1.5 mm. Those hills are, due to the changes in the local geometry, particularly susceptible to even higher heat fluxes of up to the full q[parallel]; hence, locally the temperature of W can reach up to 6000 K, and thus boiling can occur.In terms of material degradation, several aspects are considered: formation of leading edges by redistributed melt, bubble formation, and recrystallization. Bubbles are occurring in sizes between 1 and 200 m while recrystallization increases the grain size up to 1.5 mm. The power-handling capabilities are severely degraded by all those aspects. Melting of tungsten in future devices is highly unfavorable and needs to be avoided especially in light of uncontrolled transients and possible unshaped PFCs.Predamaged samples from the TEXTOR exposures have also been exposed in the JUDITH 1 facility under transient heat loads (up to [approximately]1 GW/m2, energy impact: 36 MWm-2s1/2). The samples show an unfavorable increase in the ductile-to-brittle transition temperature. In addition, surface cracks lose their directionality recrystallizing toward a more isotropic state from the manufactured monodirectional state. The increased grain size leads to a more brittle behavior under transient thermal loads with respect to crack progression.
