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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.
J. D. Spalding, L. C. Carlson, M. S. Tillack, N. B. Alexander, D. T. Goodin, R. W. Petzoldt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 435-439
Technical Paper | The Technology of Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology: Targets and Chambers | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1526
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Successful ignition of direct drive targets in an IFE power plant requires a reliable system for tracking the location of the target in flight and illuminating it by many separate laser beams with a high degree of precision. As part of a coordinated effort in the High Average Power Laser (HAPL) program, we have developed and tested an interferometric technique for measuring the position and velocity of targets along their axis of motion. The technique involves reflecting light from the moving target and combining it with a reference beam in order to produce interference fringes at a rate corresponding to the movement of the target.A scaled benchtop experiment has been built and tested to characterize the performance of this technique of axial target tracking. Results are presented here together with recommendations on improvements needed for a full-scale performance demonstration.
