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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.
A. R. Raffray, A. E. Robson, M. E. Sawan, G. Sviatoslavsky, I. N. Sviatoslavsky, X. Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 3 | October 2007 | Pages 603-608
Technical Paper | First Wall, Blanket, and Shield | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1554
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A possible way to address the issue of dry wall survival in a Laser IFE chamber is to use magnetic diversion in order to steer away the ions from the chamber wall (representing ~25-30% of the yield energy). A cusp magnetic field is imposed on to the chamber; the ions from the micro-explosion are trapped within the magnetic field and are directed to more readily accessible and replaceable dump regions at the equator and poles. A large fraction of the magnetic energy can be dissipated in the chamber walls if an electrically resistive structural material is used. An advanced blanket based on a self-cooled liquid breeder (e.g.Pb-17Li or flibe) and SiCf/SiC structure has been proposed for this purpose and a scoping design study performed as part of the High Average Power Laser program effort.This paper summarizes the results of this scoping study, and highlights the advantages of such a concept as well as the key issues that need to be addressed by R&D.
