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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
M. Schoff, D. Steinman, A. Alberti, H. Huang, A. Nikroo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 136-141
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/FST63-136
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The atomic layer deposition technique generates very thin Al2O3 films to control the hydrogen diffusion half-life of glow discharge polymer (GDP) inertial confinement fusion shells. The films generated by this process have an easily controlled thickness and are pinhole free. As a result, they can be used to set the hydrogen diffusion half-life of a GDP shell to the required value of hours, from an uncoated value of minutes. Such diffusivity control is much harder to achieve with the currently used sputtered Al coating, which also renders the shell opaque, causing difficulties with ice-layer characterization. The [approximately]10-nm oxide is also less intrusive to target performance than an [approximately]100-nm (and highly nonuniform) metal coating such that it can be safely ignored by the target designer.
