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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.
Wayne R. Meier
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 948-952
Technical Paper | Inertial Fusion Technology: Drivers and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1616
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A systems model has been developed for Z-IFE power plants. The model includes cost and performance scaling for the target physics, z-pinch driver, chamber, power conversion system and target/RTL manufacturing plant. As the base case we consider the dynamic hohlraum target and a thick liquid wall chamber with flibe as the working fluid. Driver cost and efficiency are evaluated parametrically since various options are still being considered. The model allows for power plants made up of multiple chambers and power conversion units supplied by a central target/RTL manufacturing plant. Initial results indicate that plants with few chambers operating at high yield are economically more attractive than the 10-unit plant previously proposed. Various parametric and sensitivity studies have been completed and are discussed.
