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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.
David W. Kraft, Robert G. Butler
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 475-481
Other Concepts and Assessments | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13466
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We consider a dense gas of deuterium to undergo a rapid, adiabatic compression by a piston in a chamber. A reduction in the degrees of freedom of the plasma particles, such as may be effected by an electric discharge during the compression or by the application of magnetic fields, results in a higher final temperature for a given compression ratio. In model calculations we consider the adiabatic compression of one mole of molecular deuterium modeled as a van der Waals gas initially at room temperature and we compare the subsequent fusion energy release with the work done by the piston for various values of compression ratio and degrees of freedom. Prior work considered fusion to occur only at the end of the compression while the present work considers fusion energy released at various stages during the compression. Higher final temperatures and ratios of output to input energy result from this refinement of the model.
