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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.
Zhanjie Xu, Rainer Meyder, Ulrich Fischer, Jörg Rey
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 1 | July 2007 | Pages 100-106
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1489
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since the helium-cooled pebble bed (HCPB) breeding blanket was accepted as a reference blanket concept for a future DEMO reactor in the European Union almost 10 yr ago, research and development on the breeder unit (BU) has been conducted. As the basic module of the modular blanket segmentation, the BU is the key component to fulfill the prescribed functions of the breeding blanket. In the paper, two design schemes of the HCPB BU are discussed: (a) a design with double breeder beds confined by an m-shaped container and (b) a design with a single breeder bed confined by a simpler n-shaped container. The first design features a stack of parallel straightforward channels in the cooling plates, and the second design features a group of meandering channels. The two BU variants are analyzed numerically with regard to the performance of their neutronics, thermal hydraulics, and structural mechanics. Based on the numerical analyses, the two variants are compared in the three aspects. Finally, possible improvements on the HCPB BU designs are proposed.
