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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.
W. T. Shmayda, D. R. Harding, V. A. Versteeg, C. Kingsley, M. Hallgren, S. J. Loucks
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 87-94
Technical Paper | Selected papers from 20th Target Fabrication Meeting, May 20-24, 2012, Santa Fe, NM, Guest Editor: Robert C. Cook | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16325
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Debris with footprints smaller than 40 m2 on the outer and inner surfaces with heights of <10 m on outer surfaces and [approximately]1 m on inner surfaces is present on cryogenic targets used for inertial confinement fusion studies on OMEGA. These features form during the gas-filling and cooling processes used to produce cryogenic deuterium (D2) and deuterium-tritium (DT) targets. The amount of debris on the surface has varied since the inception of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics' (LLE's) cryogenic program. The cause of the contamination is attributed to the cryogenic equipment high-vacuum and cleanliness limitations and to the radiolytic degradation of polymers. Empirical observations and a review of the processing conditions suggest that 1 mol of condensable contaminant is sufficient to account for the debris observed on a typical cryogenic target. This translates into a 3-ppm impurity content in the DT fuel.This paper focuses on condensed gases as one source of debris. It is postulated that methane, water, and nitrogen accompany the DT fuel transfer when it is transferred from the uranium storage beds that hold the DT fuel to the permeation cell where the targets are filled.